Walken plays: Robert - Congenial host, amateur photographer, patriarchal creepbag
Synopsis: The Comfort of Strangers gives you the sense of what it would be like to observe Travis Bickle from Schrader's Taxi Driver from the outside, only from the perspective of others just as unhappy and almost as weird, albeit more passable as normal. Penned by the truly impressive one-two punch of Atonement's Ian McEwan (novel) and Harold Pinter (screenplay), it's a haunting, eerie tale of lurid sexuality and obsession, the fallout of familial trauma, and the noxiously addictive nature thereof to bystanders who may not be as innocent as they seem. A young English couple, Mary and Colin (Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett), travel to Venice to patch up their listless relationship and contemplate marriage, but tension lies thicker than romance. But when they bump into Robert (Walken), a debonair but distinctly odd local, who takes them to his nearby bar for wine and conversation, things take a turn. After a drunken night of getting lost and sleeping in the street, their paths again cross with Robert, who insists on bringing them to his lavish Venetian mansion for rest and dinner. There, they meet Robert's Canadian wife Caroline (Helen Mirren), who immediately admits to watching them as they sleep, nude. The dinner is as unsettling as you'd expect, as Robert and Caroline grow subtly more predatorial...yet, once they leave, Mary and Colin are suddenly sexually ravenous for one another. Nor, in spite of the danger signals, can they seem to resist visiting Robert and Caroline one last time. The outcome is just as grotesquely disastrous as you'd expect...
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