Christopher Walken gives his creepiest performance in ’90s thriller The Comfort of Strangers

One of Walken’s very best monologues, right up there with Pulp Fiction, comes from The Comfort of Strangers, a discomfiting 1991 psychological thriller directed by Paul Schrader and written by the playwright Harold Pinter (from a novel by Ian McEwen). Walken plays Robert, a creepy Italian sophisticate dressed in white Armani who lives in Venice with his Canadian wife Caroline (Helen Mirren).

One night, Robert invites a vacationing English couple, Colin and Mary (Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson), to a bar he owns. Colin and Mary are lost and hungry, but there’s no food at the bar. Robert plies them with breadsticks and wine and spins a spellbinding, unnerving tale about his childhood, his father, his sisters, and his first meeting with Caroline. While he talks, the camera leaves their table and prowls around the bar, observing the dress and rituals of its young, male clientele, and the huge swordfish hanging on the wall, before Walken pulls it back into his gravitational orbit.

“My father was a very big man,” Walken recites in a strange, hybrid accent that reflects Robert’s upbringing in London (his father was a diplomat) and time spent in Canada. “All his life he wore a black mustache. When it turned gray he used a little brush to keep it black, such as ladies use for their eyes. Mascara.”

There’s a lot more to the monologue than that: a betrayal, an act of cruelty, perverse undercurrents. But these words echo throughout The Comfort of Strangers. They open it, in voiceover, and return for a third time at the end. They hum with masculine authority, pride, and sexual ambivalence. Walken’s shuffling cadence is a perfect vehicle for Pinter’s famously clipped sentences. They set the tone of unease for this movie about obsession, disconnection, sex, and sublimated fascism.

For its first act, The Comfort of Strangers sticks with Colin and Mary as they drift through Venice’s dreamlike labyrinth, trying to resolve an impasse in their relationship. Honestly, it can be a bit of a drag. Everett and Richardson are good; the Armani outfits, Venice locations, Dante Spinotti cinematography, and Angelo Badalamenti score are all ravishing; and Pinter’s lines are packed with resonance. But the couple are dull, and the combination of Schrader’s and Pinter’s equally spartan styles is just a bit too austere. It’s a hard, wooden bench of a movie.

Image: Skouras Pictures via Everett Collection

But what Colin and Mary don’t realise is that Robert is stalking them. Walken haunts the background and the edges of the frame, a white-suited echo of the little figure in red from Don’t Look Now. When he finally steps into the story, The Comfort of Strangers receives an electrifying jolt. Robert is urbane but domineering; Colin and Mary are hypnotized by him even though they find him unpleasant. He insists they stay at his ostentatious apartment, where the languid Caroline locks away their clothes and watches them while they sleep. In the middle of a mildly testy but polite conversation with Colin, Robert punches him hard in the stomach, then gives him a classic Walken wink. The couple come away from the encounter disturbed yet sexually charged. Then things get even weirder.

The Comfort of Strangers is a double date from hell, deliciously dark and rotten. Mirren is slightly miscast — she’s too steely and insinuating an actor to play such a drip, although she comes into her own in the movie’s shocking denouement. But Walken is at his absolute best. Somehow, as Robert, the lanky actor from Queens embodies centuries of Old World decadence and cruelty, and his talent for blunt arrogance and poised unpredictability mesh perfectly with Robert’s strangely confrontational seduction of the young couple.

The highlight of The Comfort of Strangers is unquestionably that stunning monologue. It might be too good for the rest of the film, which, in its actual action, can’t muster anything quite so subtly disturbing. Christopher Walken may never have been more sinister, which is really saying something — and he’s more than enough reason to watch this twisted little film to the end.