Savage Grace Introduced by the director

Director Tom Kalin burst onto the national scene with his debut feature, Swoon, one of the most dazzling works within the new queer cinema of the early 1990s. His latest, Savage Grace, is an equally subversive take on the true-crime genre.

Based on a best-selling account of the rich and dissolute heirs to the Bakelite plastics fortune, Savage Grace headlines Julianne Moore as a desperately insecure social climber with an unnaturally close bond to her handsome gay son (Eddie Redmayne), a viperish disdain for her husband (Stephan Dillane), and a taste for all the excess that a stylish 1950s’ jet-setter could grab. Drugs, sex, and incest tell the rest of the story, in Kalin’s remarkably evocative rendition of this grabbed-from-the-tabloids antimorality tale. (89 mins., 35mm)