SAFE (1995)

Todd Haynes’ Safe only grows more challenging, hypnotic, and prophetic as it ages. The story of Carol White (Julianne Moore), a woman in crisis, Safe was the writer-director’s third feature film, and it’s an L.A. story through and through.

Los Angeles in 1995 saw the International Airport threatened by the Unabomber; it saw a thousand-person march take place downtown, led by the families of victims of gun violence. The end of the O.J Simpson trial, a seemingly endless saga that exposed the frailty of the city itself, came in October, while to the south, in San Diego, a US Army vet stole a tank and went on a rampage. Was it something in the air?

“The noxious haze of smog that hangs over Los Angeles and the surrounding urban basin has long been the thickest, unhealthiest, and most infamous in the country”, wrote B. Drummond Ayres Jr. in The New York Times in November of 1995, continuing “as much a symbol of the city to many people as Hollywood. Some days the brown haze hangs so heavy that it seems that no progress has been made”.

It wasn’t just a feeling of heaviness, of airlessness. The data backed it up: in the Greater Los Angeles area of the Inland Empire: “Microscopic particles of air pollution, largely from diesel and gasoline exhaust, cause an estimated 275 premature deaths from heart and lung ailments yearly”, wrote Marla Cone in March of 1995 for the LA Times. Los Angeles, the sprawling metropolis, stretching from the mysterious blues of the Pacific to the ancient red dusts of the desert, seemed to be a poisoned paradise. Most of the people in Carol’s life accept the poison as part of the deal—one of their five a day, a sort of body immunity growing to it. As long as they have their home on a winding dark street from which they cannot see the suffering, then all will be well.

Carol is a stylish, somewhat meek, self-described ‘homemaker’. She begins to say ‘housewife’, but corrects herself after the first syllable. She buys furniture, she brunches with friends, and takes aerobics classes. “You know Carol, you do not sweat”, a friend points out in the changing room. Here’s where a woman in a commercial would respond by revealing the product that stops them from sweating, that prevents basic bodily functions. Instead, Carol doesn’t know quite how to respond, her expression quietly begging them to change the subject.

Sometimes she looks like a Roy Lichtenstein image. She wears whites and baby blues, ghostly silk gowns and flowery jumpers. Her hair, a blazing red, is like a glowing arrow pointing at a woman who wishes she could disappear. Her gaze is fixed on the ceiling and her thoughts miles away as her husband Greg (Xander Berkeley) pumps away in adolescent self-absorption on top of her.

There’s a child in the house too. Rory (Chauncey Leopardi) is Greg’s son from a previous marriage. Greg refers to Carol as Rory’s ‘mother’, but there’s a sense that Carol is playing a part here as well. Her lines are rehearsed, her voice ethereal but computerised, a human speak-and-spell whom society has programmed, a Stepford Wife humming with cosmic dread.

Safe is set in 1987, when Ronald Reagan was two years into his second term as President, his trickle-down theory of economics now six years in, and still only benefiting the rich. The era of social change was now passé; consumerism and avarice not just acceptable but valued traits, grotesqueries presented as aspirational.

Haynes started figuring his film out in 1991, and by the time it was released in 1995, it benefited from its duality: it’s both about recent American history and the then-current day.

Pervasive through Safe is the sense that something is very, very wrong, that disaster looms on every horizon. The 1987 earthquake in Whittier, California gave brief credence to the old belief that one day an earthquake would send California into the Pacific. “If California slides into the ocean, like the mystics and statistics say it will”, Warren Zevon once sang, “I predict this motel will be standing, until I’ve paid my bill”. Everyone in Los Angeles has a price to pay.

It’s a city obsessed with its own destruction—less than a year after Safe was released we witnessed L.A. razed to a pile of smouldering cinders in Independence Day (1996), while another year later the city was once again punished in the form of a volcano (1997’s Volcano). Is there some catharsis in this, for Angelenos? Is it a form of blockbusting self-flagellation? A land that was never supposed to belong to the people who colonised it is pictured in varying degrees of destruction over and over again. The cinematic heroes—like or Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando (1985) or Sylvester Stallone in Cobra (1986)—spill more blood, wreak more havoc, take more human lives than any natural disaster.

As Thom Andersen points out in his masterful 2003 essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, the LAPD seem almost to reach a level of self-parody: the words on the side of every cop car, ‘To Protect and Serve‘, are written in quotation marks. The fact that Reagan, a washed-up movie star who named names during the communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, segued from Hollywood to becoming Governor of California (1967-1975) is less an example of an American-Icon-as-Leader, and more a sign that the country—and the state—could not let go of the fading screen images of its past.

Reagan’s soundbites as President sounded as if they were taken from old B-Westerns, encouraging a nation to grow comfortable with phoniness, amenable to the idea that they were all secretly playing parts: presidents, cops, robbers, movie stars, yuppies, housewives—it was all part of reality-as-a-movie. Los Angeles is the most filmed and photographed city in the world; it’s no wonder that it all feels like one giant movie set.

Carol’s life looks like a movie that is failing, an image chewed up in the projector.

Beyond the steel gates of Carol and Greg’s home, a garage swallows up the black town car. Ed Tomney’s score, replete with brooding synth pads and haunted strings, stalks these scenes, recalling the soul-stirring dread of Angelo Badalamenti and the dazed daydreams of Brian Eno.

The geometry of the house is confounding. Each scene presents us with a new room, or corner of a room, or darkened hallway, none of which seem to connect. There are windows everywhere but darkness consumes the house. Giant glass eggs sit on side tables, shag-carpeted steps descend into large living rooms. Outside, palm trees hang over the streets in silhouette like sentinels. It’s a futuristic museum, its inhabitants viewed from front-facing and perpendicular angles. It looks like a mock-up doll’s house of a 20th-century home, its inhabitants unaware that their lives are on display.

Haynes has said that he took inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when developing the look of the film, and certainly there’s a retro-futurism here that feels almost like science fiction—heightened, too, by the fact that Carol seems as if she’s on an alien planet that she cannot acclimatise to.

One day, Carol drives behind a truck that spews black exhaust smoke, sending her into a coughing fit. She swerves her car off the street and down into a parking complex, safe below the fumes and noise of the city above. Her coughing continues—is she choking, or having a panic attack?

Like the first spot on a rash to come, she begins having severe reactions to more than just fumes. At a friend’s house, her breathing is caught in her throat—Haynes and Moore made the decision that Carol’s voice should be so soft that the actress would put no weight on her larynx to perform it. Here, it’s as if Carol can’t even cough with confidence. Carol tries to smile, to brush it off, just another mildly embarrassing side effect of modern living. Soon she begins fainting, and zones out as her friend tells a joke over dinner. Haynes, whose wry sense of humour here forms a bedrock of social satire, might be giving his audience a way in: wouldn’t you zone out at the tiresome jokes of this total fucking bore, too?

Her doctor can see nothing wrong with her. She drinks mostly milk; he advises her to lay off dairy. Greg grows petulantly angry with her for not feeling well enough to make love, and when she describes her strange new symptoms, the most he can muster up is a shrug. Haynes’ filmography is populated by women and queer people who are misunderstood—or not understood at all—by the men in their lives. Under a hetero-male hierarchy, Carol is expected to function as seamlessly as any other appliance in the house. When she becomes ill, her body rejecting these archaic gender roles, Greg treats her like something that needs to be fixed, as if she can be sent back to the manufacturer like the couch that she receives by mistake. She didn’t order a black couch she tells them; it doesn’t go with any of their furniture.

In a doctor’s waiting room, she comes across a flyer for Wrenwood, a New Age desert retreat designed for people suffering from something called Environmental Illness, or E.I. for short. There, miles away from the chemicals of the city, they can detox, meet fellow sufferers of the disease, and perhaps find a new way of living. Greg is unconvinced. “You think that’s what’s making you sick? Bug spray?”.

Like so many people who have been dismissed by doctors and patronised by spouses, Carol finds a strange kind of hope in this new potential explanation of her problems. It’s the air that is making her sick. She isn’t depressed. She isn’t lonely, or unsatisfied. It isn’t mental illness that causes her to wander her garden like a ghost in a Shirley Jackson novel in the night, a patrol car stopping to observe. “Everything okay, Ma’am?”. Of course she’s okay; she just has a medical condition.

Carol gets rid of her tainted furniture with something approaching glee. “You know our couch? Our beautiful new couch? Totally toxic”, she tells a friend. Wrenwood, removed from domestic disease, seduces her. It’s a place where people break out acoustic guitars for hymn-like sing-alongs, where New Age-iness is just convincing and just vague enough to stop the spiritually starved from asking about the details.

Carol leaves the city and its fumes behind, but even in the isolated eden of Wrenwood, people are still sick. A woman in a medical mask screams at the taxi Carol arrives in to stop, claiming it’s contaminating the air. A strange figure clad in head-to-toe hazmat gear wanders the grounds like a cryptid. Carol is told not to worry; his case is extreme, and he lives in total isolation in a bunker.

“Who are you?”, speaks a bearded man styled as a professor in a video introduction to Wrenwood, ethereal music gently harmonising with him. “You are of all ages and from all walks of life but you find you all have one thing in common: strange, never-ending ailments. Suddenly you can’t cook dinner any more because the smell of the gas from your stove makes you ill. Or if you take the freeway you feel as if you might choke on the fumes”. Whether true or bogus, this is the first time Carol’s experiences have been validated.

On a walk, Carol comes across a road where a single car roars by. She stumbles away, coughing, panicking. She seems more feeble than she ever has. Julianne Moore’s performance is astonishing–Carol seems like she might evaporate any moment, but she isn’t weak. She seems always to have been caught unawares, frightened, her vulnerability childlike—when she’s called upon to give a birthday speech at Wrenwood, she ineloquently rambles about what she’s learned. Rarely has an actor portrayed uncertainty with quite so much assuredness. Carol is trying to find herself, trying to make sense of what is happening to her, even as she’s filled with doubt.

Doubt is exactly what Haynes is aiming for. Wrenwood is run by Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), a kindly, approachable quasi-life-coach who encourages Carol to make a permanent move to the site. She’s unconvincing when she says her husband and son will join her later. Peter is living with AIDS, and purports that the commune can help people alleviate their symptoms as he has done—by practising love and acceptance.

Haynes became fascinated by New Age healing fads in the early 1990s, and it’s easy to understand why. People who had been failed by medicine and their governments were desperate—by 1995, “AIDS had become the leading cause of death among all Americans aged 25 to 44 with over half a million reported cases and over 300,000 deaths”. Ronald Reagan’s refusal to respond to the crisis decimated queer communities—it was only taken with relative seriousness once straight figures of prominence began opening up about their battles with AIDS.

Haynes, who is gay, became fascinated by the work of people like Louise Hay, a New Age author of the 1980s who claimed that she could help people alleviate their AIDS symptoms by teaching them to practise self-love. Hay was popular amongst gay men, offering a place of acceptance and love in a hostile world—here, Wrenwood provides something of a stand-in for Louise Hay, a safe place for people who were cast out by a cruel, uncaring society.

Yet what is so masterful about Safe is the uncertainty. Peter is approachable, charming, and everything about him seems genuine. Louise Hay was described the same way. But Haynes lets us know that Peter lives in a large manor house on the commune, while everyone else lives in small, spare accommodations. Peter gives empowering speeches that have no practical advice, holding court like a motivational speaker, his hangers-on completing the image of a cult-under-construction.

Haynes treats his characters with sympathy rather than condescension, is interested not just in illness but what we do in response to the illness. Is Peter a saint or Svengali? Is Carol treating her sickness, or is she embellishing a delusion? Safe isn’t a film where answers are presented or judgements made. It’s possible to see things from a multitude of angles, but what seems most urgent, most undeniable, is that Safe is a film about the roles we are assigned, and the roles that we create for ourselves in response. It’s a film maddened by a culture of product slogans and platitudes, of imposed personalities and the limits of our facades.

Carol is a modernised version of a Douglas Sirk heroine, put-upon and trodden down into the carpeting of their homes, silenced until an internal storm rages and spills out as sickness, infidelity, or madness. Haynes and Moore would revisit this more explicitly in the sumptuous Sirk tribute Far From Heaven (2003), but there’s something so thrilling about the coldness, the detachment, the outright terror in Safe.

Haynes has dabbled with camp filmmaking (the wonderful Velvet Goldmine, for instance), but there’s none of that here. It’s as if the film is trying to keep at a distance, as if it might infect us too, but can’t help going in for a closer look. Safe is quiet and observant—so much so that we begin to feel as if we’re scientists watching an experiment.

Carol is pushed to the corners of Haynes’ frames, dwarfed by her environment. The way Haynes and cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy photograph Wrenwood reminds us of her house miles away in San Fernando. She’s getting sicker, and requires an oxygen tank that she drags around with her like a broken leg. When Greg visits, she cannot hug him because his shirt smells of cologne. It recalls those first months of Covid, and the ensuing lockdowns.

It’s impossible not to think of what we read every day about toxins, pollution, and chemicals. As of 2025, it’s estimated that the average person consumes 5mg of microplastics every week, while Los Angeles is still the number one smoggiest city in the US. And the wretched spirit of Reagan continues—the Trump administration recently slashed federal funding for HIV and AIDS programmes. A study by the UN suggests that HIV and AIDS related deaths could now double in the next decade.

Our fears may be valid, but it also remains painfully true that we live amongst grifters, con artists and snake-oil salesmen keen to exploit those fears. If that’s what Peter is, then he has a modern equivalent in conspiracy theorists, in people who sell amulets that claim to protect you from 5G rays, in self-help gurus who insist that people with cancer actually caused it by thinking negatively, while supposedly thinking positive thoughts will bring us riches beyond our wildest dreams—as if the twin poles of modern living are money and death, everything in between irrelevant.

Safe, as much as it focuses on physical ailments, is about spiritual sickness. We look for something larger in a deeply ungiving culture, and it hardly matters whether what we find it beautiful or horrendous. We look to anything that will take us away from what we are living with every day of our lives. Our real sicknesses, the real agonies of our lives, go unexamined. We look away from what we know we can’t fix, approaching dead ends with the delusion that this might be the thing that saves us. We trade sickness for sickness, role for role, hiding away from the sun and its rays, from the water and its toxins, never knowing quite what to believe, but hoping that when we come out again, our heads will be clear, we will be happy, and our new skin will protect us from pain.

USA • UK | 1995 | 119 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • SPANISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Todd Haynes.
starring: Julianne Moore, Peter Friedman, Xander Berkeley, Susan Norman, Kate McGregor-Stewart, James LeGros, Mary Carver, Martha Velez, Chauncey Leopardi (credited as ‘Chauncy Leopardi’) & Steven Gilborn.