The eco-horror genre can often take a high-energy, high-action approach. We’ve seen animals and/or insects transformed by an environmental shift that makes them want to attack every human in their midst. We’ve seen nature twisted into spawning vicious monsters both giant and microscopic. We’ve also seen the weather go haywire and spiral into an ice age in act three after ripping Los Angeles with tornados in act one.
But not every eco-horror film speaks in such a loud voice. In 2011, Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter explored the fragmenting domestic life of a construction worker whose apocalyptic visions soon become an obsession; as he prepares for doom, his increasingly exasperated loved ones assume he’s completely nuts. In 2021, Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth investigated a story obliquely about the covid-19 pandemic, set in a forest where the plants have launched an offensive against all human invaders.
Even earlier, Todd Haynes’ Safe—released in theaters 30 years ago this month after debuting at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival—dug into maybe the eeriest sort of eco-horror of all. You can’t see it, hear it, or even feel it, unless you’re Safe’s main character: Carol White, a housewife played by then-emerging star Julianne Moore.
Safe takes place in 1987 in the suburbs of Los Angeles, where Carol, clad in pastels and pearls, spends her days running errands, ordering her housekeeper around, and attending aerobics classes. It’s a comfortable yet dull life; what passes for drama is a new couch being delivered in the wrong color, or a friend suggesting they try out a faddish all-fruit diet.
Carol doesn’t smoke or drink—she describes herself as a “milkaholic”—and her personality is quite passive. She doesn’t seem to have much of an interior life. Her lack of expressiveness matches perfectly with the style Haynes uses to tell his story: it’s very reserved, almost to the point of feeling airless and sterile. We’re peering in on Carol almost like she’s a figure in a diorama that tells her story.
But if Carol seems like someone who must have a rebellion bubbling within, Safe–released at the height of the AIDS epidemic, a crisis it references both overtly and symbolically—turns that idea on its head. While in some senses it is a feminist comment on how stifling gender roles can be, Safe is also a movie about a woman whose body begins to break down in response to her otherwise unremarkable environment, imperiling both her physical and mental health.
If you watch Safe already knowing where Carol is headed, it’s easy to pick out the clues. The first thing we hear from her is a sneeze—a gentle harbinger of the coughing fits, vomiting, nosebleeds, hyperventilation, skin eruptions, and seizures that eventually come along.
Her McMansion existence, untaxing as it seems, is full of toxic triggers and pollutants: wall-to-wall carpet that’s constantly being vacuumed, kitchen cabinets that must be re-varnished, car exhaust from LA’s perpetual traffic jams, planes flying overhead, humming appliances, phones ringing, TVs and radios blaring, and looming electrical towers. We see Carol visit the dry cleaner on multiple occasions, including a disastrous attempt to pick up clothes while the place is being fumigated, and at one point she decides to add a perm and a manicure to her beauty salon routine.
But everyone else in her life who dwells in this San Fernando Valley bubble is seemingly fine. It’s just Carol who starts having violent reactions, and the initial response—particularly from her husband, who’s continuously disbelieving though he does become somewhat more supportive—is that it’s all in her head. She’s just “overexerted.” “A little run down.”
“I really don’t see anything wrong with you,” her regular physician scolds, while advising her to stay off dairy and forget the fruit diet, too. A litany of allergy tests prove inconclusive. A psychiatrist, perched behind a massive desk, looks at her quizzically, asking “What’s going on in you?”
As Carol downshifts from delicate to fragile to frail, her illness becomes her entire identity, and she finally finds—not answers, but a community of people suffering from similar symptoms. (She finds them through a flyer posted on her health club’s bulletin board that very pointedly asks: “Are you allergic to the 20th century?”) Treatment requires moving to a communal-living retreat in the desert, which takes Carol away from a life it seems she’ll hardly miss, despite at least one emotional outburst as she’s settling in.
Exactly how Carol has fallen victim to this debilitating condition is something we never learn. The way Haynes frames her weakening existence is extremely effective, implying that it’s an ambient ailment that could seep into anyone, anywhere, even in cushy surroundings. Safe is also remarkable in the way that it takes Carol’s illness very seriously—the audience believes her, even if other characters don’t—while also satirizing a New Age industry eagerly profiting off its patients. Carol and her fellow residents are wealthy enough to pay out of pocket for residential treatment, but naive enough not to question why the program’s founder lives in a mansion that looms over the property.
The most chilling part of Safe, though, is its ambiguous ending. Even amid her new home’s isolated location, where everyone observes rules about chemicals, eats organic food, and undergoes regular therapy, Carol doesn’t recover. Eventually she moves from a rustic cabin to an igloo-like structure that completely encloses a “safe room,” free from contaminants as long as Carol is the only one who goes inside.
Even then, and despite continuing to insist that she’s feeling so much better, Carol is clearly deteriorating. Steadily. As Safe concludes, the audience is openly invited to wonder if she will ever get better—and if the choice she’s made, to live in isolation in a place completely structured around environmental illness, was even worth it.
After 30 years, the answers still don’t come easily. Most haunting of all, environmental illnesses still lurk among us—as quietly insidious, inviting of skepticism, and enigmatic as ever.
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