Usually I don't think much of her acting, and I did feel one scene to be fair was a bit more energy than acting... but she did a great job in this film. I'm usually turned off, but pleasantly surprised by her this time around.
Apparently she's gone to acting school.
I agree but not as being an expert on acting but as a clinical psychologist with experience seeing many psychotic patients in mental hospitals in the 1950s & 60s.
And, why would an hysteric "over dramatizing" anything be thought unusual?
she acted...like an actress.
sake happens
It you are referring to the way actresses tend to be a little loco in real life.I agree. Watch the movie Mulholland Drive if you want a cautionary tale. Also, look up "impostor syndrome," which is common among young starlets who have skyrocketed to fame overnight.
shareWhatever people say about her over acting or not, I couldn't believe her for one second in this role. It was like she was thinking far too much and I felt her performance was forced. I think she's very hit and miss when it comes to acting and I don't feel like she was right for this role. She greatly disappointed me, despite the fact that I'm quite a fan of her films and not to mention her beauty. Maybe Eva Green or Rachel Weisz (would she be too old?) would be better at taking on this particular role? I don't know, just my opinion
shareI thought at the beginning she was too over-the-top, but as the film progressed her acting got much better.
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She went overboard with her hysterics. It just wasn't believable. (At least to me!)
share"She went overboard with her hysterics."
What? This comment makes absolutely no sense. If she subdued her hysterics they wouldn't be "hysterics", now, would they? ...
"She went overboard with her hysterics."
What? This comment makes absolutely no sense. If she subdued her hysterics they wouldn't be "hysterics", now, would they? ...
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It makes sense. I believe the person who said that means that she overacted that part - it simply was not believable. I agree. (Keira's acting got much better afterwards, methinks.)
She was completely unbelievable in that role. Whether anyone thinks she was over acting or not, she was awful either way.
shareI just want to add that I have seen hysterical attacks and they are not pretty. They are sort of repulsive. Any actress who is right for the part is wrong for the part. What pretty young actress would want to make herself repulsive.?
shareHave you ever seen a real hysteric, i mean really hysteric female? If you did, you wouldn't write such a thing. If Sabina's behaving wasn't looking like Keira presented us, would she be taken to Jung's clinic?
Don't forget, this was decades before health insurance and medicine (depending on country) free or almost free of any payment that today almost forces people to visit their doctor every time they sneeze or think they might have a headache. It was almost a century before pharmaceutic industry discovered how profitable is to convince people that they are ill, very ill (no matter how good they feel) and that they should take as many medications as possible.
In the system of rare, expensive and hardly reachable medical institutions even the rich people have been thinking more than twice before calling a doctor, let alone taking their daughter to sanatorium like the one we see in the movie. If Sabina's hysteric seizures didn't look like the ones that you call overacting, nobody would care and take time and money to look for help (or, more likely, to get rid of her and her behaving that was probably traumatizing her whole family and - also very important in those years - ruining its reputation).
I've been on the fence about Knightley and watching this performance remained there. I also felt the performance was over-the-top...but what role out there would require anyone to be any less over-the-top? The role required her to be exactly the way people are complaining about. I finally decided that whether she went too far or not was not the issue...but did the performance feel false in any way? To me, it did not. So thumbs up to Kiera.
It was like she was thinking far too much...
It was incredibly hammy, not shocking or striking. People are applauding it for being realistic but it was actually a pretty crude performance; hardly any nuance at all. And even if it was realistic, an actor still has to engage his / her audience, which she failed to do. The two male actors were a lot more assured.
shareI agree.
shareI'am familiar with bad acting and not all hysterics is like the one she demonstrated in this movie.Have you ever been around someone who was hysteric besides watching movies of people pretending to be hysteric?
Therefore we may call that art true at which does not seem to be art."
I had a relative that suffered from Hysteria back in the 50's and she looked exactly like Keira if not worse. Her acting was very convincing, it reminded me of my poor cousin. She should have won the Oscar for that.
shareI have no idea why this is being discussed without reference to the fact that "hysteria" has not been taking seriously as a diagnostic category in many decades. Why? Because it is considered a deeply, deeply flawed and inherently sexist diagnosis (only women were diagnosed as "hysterics"). You are acting like there is some straightforward idea of a woman "hysteric" in modern psychology. Not the case. First,it was a catch-all diagnosis in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, when women suffering from drastically different issues (what would now be categorized as depression to bipolar to schizophrenia and on and on -- these are not the "same" condition) were treated with horrendous "milk diets," were considered sexually flawed -- either promiscuous or "frigid," all considered junk in modern psychology.
So there is no type that Keira's overacting confirmed to -- some actual "hysteric" (which is actually very insulting) -- mental illness is very complicated and manifests differently in each patient.
"It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?" Blade Runner (1982)
It's not about whether the acting is realistic or not; it's about how it fits in with the basic essence of the film. Cronenberg is a classic minimalist. And when you consider that all of his films feature performances by actors who employ a "less is more" acting philosophy (including the rest of the cast in this film), Knightley's performance just stands out like a sore thumb. In another film it may have been a much better performance, but set against the backdrop of Cronenberg's unrelenting minimalism, her gesticulations and histrionics just felt terribly out of place.
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