the film leaves no one off the hook. The logic of Thomas' review is consistently baffling. He makes the preposterous assertion that there's no need for anyone to see Closet Land because anyone who's aware of world events knows that political prisoners are subject to torture. But, by the same token, anyone who reads the newspaper knows that racism, drug abuse, poverty and other ills plague our society. So why depict the harrowing aspects of any social problem on film? Why don't we all just make romantic comedies? Kathleen Murphy of Film Comment further responded to the critical reception, explaining that the film "has suffered the kind of skin-deep read so prevalent among film reviewers driven primarily by deadlines and the contemporary demand for hip distanciation ." Entertainment Weekly'''s box [office] score of critical grades for Bharadwaj's smart, passionate directorial debut averaged out at a D, lower even than that earned by the brain-dead thriller Sleeping with the Enemy" and that "though presented by Ron Howard's Imagine company and distributed by Universal - [the film] swiftly sank into last-week's-movie limbo. That's our loss." Her opinion of the film was overall overwhelmingly positive, dubbing it a "complex metaphor to political specificity," an "Alice in Closetland" that "had to be pulled out of its author's head into the Real World for validation." Analysing the film's themes, she said that "the film works most potently as a woman's redemptive fantasy, a harrowing Alice in Wonderland descent into the darkness behind the brain to discover 'the soul's true face.'" Critiquing the political and sexually abusive overtones, she noted that Stowe's character is "denuded of even a name, depersonalized into a number. Such erasure - of self and sexuality - is the legacy of child molestation; but it also suggests the powerfully seductive buildups and letdowns that dominate contemporary media images of women." Praising the characterisations and performances, she likened Stowe's character to Kafka's Josef K. and said of Rickman's character, drawing comparisons to Big Brother: "Out of her imagination's rich store, Stowe has created a man of many parts, an actor who will play both satan and saviour to her sinner. Rickman receives her as the 'officer-in-charge', but he wears many masks - Grand Inquisitor, fellow victim, father, lover, therapist, the rapist - before he baptizes Stowe into authentic selfhood." She further praised the production design by Ishioka and elaborated on the final scene,