A drama like Savage Grace won’t sit well with everyone. The film, directed by Tom Talin, provides one of the strangest and most disturbing mother-son relationships ever to grace the silver screen, all the more so because the story is based on reality. Barbara Daly Baekeland, excellently portrayed by Julianne Moore, is a model and wannabe Hollywood starlet, as well as a wealthy socialite, who becomes an heiress to the Baekelite plastic fortune when she marries Leo Baekeland, grandson of Baekelite’s founder. The film opens in the couple’s luxurious Manhattan apartment when their son Antony (or Tony) is an infant. An elder Tony provides a voice-over to expose us to his early perceptiveness of Leo’s cold and distant nature, as well as Barbara’s warmth and love, despite her propensity for frequently attending fancy parties and leaving little Tony with her mother, Nini.

Throughout Savage Grace, orchestral music by Fernando Velasquez is stirring, but somewhat over-the-top, producing a melodramatic effect. The film’s dramatic content is  compelling on its own, and rather delicately revealed over the course of many years. Though it allows for post-screening discourse, Savage Grace is far from an ideal date movie, unless your date wouldn’t mind watching dysfunctional, incestuous relationships. Yes, incest does occur, after a rather slow and psychologically revelatory buildup. The mental and emotional states of interconnected, and intimately related, characters are handled with care and precision by Talin, as well as achieved through incredible acting on the parts of Moore, Stephen Dillane, and Eddie Redmayne, who gives Tony his unnerving, yet compassionate edge.

Tony is connected to Barbara in ways that reach beyond the typical mother-only son attachment. As they live throughout Europe, the family of artistic mother, distant father, and introverted son exist as if on an island apart from the rest of the world. With their wealth and prestige, the family seems to have too much free time on their hands and they don’t quite know what to do inside the beauty of Greece or France. Even as a child, Barbara treats loyal and inquisitive Tony as an adult, and she relies on him for affection, emotional support, and as a cure for her loneliness. Barbara’s marriage to Leo is rocky and at times even borders on violent, as revealed through a rough sex scene in a hotel room, which Leo retreats to after an argument.

Tony begins to assert his independence in his late teen years, and he hangs out on the rocky coast with his attractive friend, Jake, to play music, dance, and smoke cigarettes. Leo is concerned with Tony’s aberrant sexuality from the time he invited his male friend to sleep over while his parents were out and, when Tony meets a beautiful Spanish girl, his parents take them out in hopes that they will fall in love. As Leo tells Blanca about his famous grandfather, Tony and Barbara bond over a consistent lack of love from Leo. Although Tony does sleep with Blanca that night, Barbara later finds Leo at an airport with the young girl, whom he has taken on his mistress. Barbara confronts the two of them and says, “How could you do this to Tony? You’re breaking his heart,” to which Blanca calmly replies, “No, we’re not.” Tony has become lovers with Jake, and though his homosexuality is known (Tony is not afraid to be affectionate with Jake in front of his mother), it is not quite accepted.

After Leo and Barbara separate, and Leo continues to live with Blanca, Barbara is shattered. She invites her bisexual friend, Sam, to live with her for a few weeks and reintegrate her, as single and fabulous, into the socialite scene. Unfortunately, Sam’s helpfulness soon becomes rather perverse, as he and Tony end up in bed together. Within the next few days, he and the sexually hungry Barbara also become intimate, and Tony finds them curled up in his her bed. Just when you expect him to leave and become upset, Tony, instead, takes off his shorts and curls around Sam. Talin provides an astonishing overhead shot of Sam sandwiched between mother and son, perfectly cast with their reddish hair, pale skin, and ample scattering of freckles, as if opposite halves of the same person. When Barbara wakes up and discovers her son in the bed, she laughs and the three of them become innocently hysterical, which soon leads to some sort of ménage-à-trois without many boundaries or hesitation. The characters here are infallible, shrouded in emotional ambiguity, and certainly complex.

Within the next few years, Barbara attempts suicide by slitting her wrist and taking suppository laxatives. Tony cares for her out of love and loyalty; one particularly eerie, yet touching scene involves Barbara in the bathtub eating ice cream as Tony delicately strokes ointment onto her stitches, after which Barbara remarks, “That was lovely.” Tony is playing the male role Barbara always wished Leo could perform, yet Tony wrestles with his now-nonexistent relationship with his father, who refuses to see him.

Partially to cure him of his homosexuality and partially because Barbara, who is obviously suffering from some type of manic depression, wants to be as close as she can to Tony, she begins to pleasure him. Initiated by Barbara, the two have intercourse, though we are not sure if this is their first time. Afterward, Tony appears to be in a heightened state of anxiety, and he yells at Barbara for misplacing his dead dog’s collar, which he has brought from house to house and country to country, without misplacing, for almost his entire life. As he continues to scream at her in the kitchen for hiding it, it becomes apparent that he is also suffering from a mental disorder, most likely schizophrenia. Talin could have made this more apparent earlier on in the film, as it only comes to light in the last scene or two, but, in any event, Tony’s love-hate feelings for Barbara are enough to push him over the edge. Tony has been tied to his mother by an invisible, ever-stretching umbilical cord and, finally, it needs to be cut. Tony stabs Barbara, calls for an ambulance, and then orders Chinese food, completely unmoved by the murder.