A Woman Under the Influence
- heavy
- measured
- extreme
- bleak
- signature
Heavy, measured, extreme drama, grounded in texture. Nihilistic, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →Mabel Longhetti, desperate and lonely, is married to a Los Angeles municipal construction worker, Nick. Increasingly unstable, especially in the company of others, she craves happiness, but her extremely volatile behavior convinces Nick that she poses a danger to their family and decides to commit her to an institution for six months. Alone with a trio of kids to raise on his own, he awaits her return, which holds more than a few surprises.
Our read · A Woman Under the Influence (1974) reads as a heavy, measured, grounded drama entry — extreme in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, nihilistic in outlook, with a strong directorial signature. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
Availability in the UK · via JustWatch
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The shape of A Woman Under the Influence
What watching it is actually like.
“You want raw Cassavetes family chaos where love and breakdown collide onscreen.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if improvised marital unraveling and social humiliation feel too exposing.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
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