DailyView: Day 228, Movie 315

I am not very familiar with the catalogue of performances from Roy Scheider, outside of Jaws and Jaws II of course. When I came across this film with Scheider and Meryl Streep on Amazon Prime, I was interested and the synopsis tripped some buttons for me.

Scheider played psychiatrist Sam Rice, who had a patient named George Bynum (Josef Sommer) who was murdered. George was stabbed to death and the police wanted to know if George had told Sam anything of importance.

However, before the police arrived, a woman named Brooke Reynolds (Meryl Streep) came to see Sam with a watch that belonged to George. She admitted to having an affair with him and wanted Sam to return the watch to George’s wife so she did not have to suffer more than she already was.

Sam became infatuated with Brooke and he was intrigued with trying to find out if she was actually involved in the murder.

This was an okay film, but I did not love it. It felt fairly pedestrian. We spend a chunk of time at an art auction that seemed to try and build some tension, and it was a long and dull stretch of time.

Scheider and Streep were good here, as was Jessica Tandy, who had a small role as Sam’s mother. Joe Grifasi played a police detective that was interesting, but he did not have much to do.

The biggest issue is the mystery. The police kept indicating that the killer was a woman. Because of that, we have Meryl Streep’s Brooke and one other main female character in the movie. This means that either it was Meryl or it was this other woman. Not much of a mystery, especially since they spent most of the film making it look as if it were Meryl.

Still of the Night, which is a nondescript title, is not a terrible film, but there is little about it that really stands out. This is the type of movie that will not stick with me for long.