This Tempting Madness is the kind of film that starts as a mystery with a dash of whodunit, throws in a fair bit of drama, and ends up being an engaging and sometimes surprising psychological thriller. Buyoed by an outstanding performance by a Simone Ashley who gets to showcase the full extent of her range, the movie examines the pitfalls of memory only to arrive at the most obvious and yet heartbreaking conclusion of all: sometimes in life, the answers are anything but simple.
Ashley carries the movie with poise. We open with her character, Mia, falling from a great height, and go straight into her waking up from a coma with severe physical and mental consequences, including short-term and long-term memory loss, multiple wounds, and broken limbs. From there, we try to piece together what happened alongside Mia, as the story reveals that Mia’s husband, Jake (Austin Stowell), has been arrested for attempted murder.
Told in a non-linear manner, and with the abundance of storytelling tricks meant to leave us a little destabilized, just like Mia, This Tempting Madness still manages to be not just compelling, but at times impossible to look away from. This is both because Ashley hits every emotional beat, from confusion to desperation to the low-grade panic of losing your sense of self, and because even from the beginning, we’re kinda rooting for Jake not to be what things seem.
I might be biased here, but Stowell is pretty good in a role that doesn’t require nearly as much from him as Ashley’s. Still, there’s a certain lightness to him at times, and a depth to Jake that makes it clear he’s playing a much different character from NCIS: Origins‘ Leroy ‘Jethro’ Gibbs. That, for someone who gets to see him weekly in that other role, means he’s doing a pretty good job.
He’s not the standout here, because his role doesn’t call for him to be, but he’s in no way distracting as we get to focus solely on Ashley’s Mia and her relationship with her brother, played by a raw and believable Suraj Sharma. This dynamic carries the movie, and at times feels like the only thing we can hold onto as the story takes turn after turn.
Cinematography-wise, the movie is visually striking, and there’s enough specificity in the cultural elements that it feels like the people behind This Tempting Madness were really interested in making Mia a real, three-dimensional character. They got lucky with an actress like Ashley, who often doesn’t need to even utter a word to make you feel things. But there’s also a lot of work that clearly went into making this story work.
Director and co-writer Jennifer E. Montgomery (who shares a writing credit on this with her husband, Andrew M. Davis) has said the story is based on someone she knows, and that is perhaps why This Tempting Madness feels, at all times, like a story being told with care and a desire to get things right. If you add to that an actress of Ashley’s caliber, you have a movie that is both an exploration of trauma and memory and a study of who we are and who we can be.
Come for Simone Ashley, stay for a good story. This one’s worth a watch.
This Tempting Madness will be in theaters on June 12.
