Can a film with those attributes also be insulting garbage? It's a difficult aesthetic-philosophical conundrum, but having sat through this damn thing I now have an answer. Bello's skin-peeling, ultra-depresso performance is wrenching and brave, calling for both emotional and physical nakedness. One film that will not be acquired by anybody at Sundance – I'll just crawl out on a limb with this one – is Downloading Nancy. , in a report about the films at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, wrote: Performances are cranked up to red-line neurotic levels, while production values intently contribute to creating an artificially bleak world where it's understandable scarcely anyone would want to spend time, even for the duration of this movie. Variety called the film a 'forbidding and morbid piece of psycho- sadomasochism' with a 'swimming-in-the-deep-end performance by Maria Bello that is the definition of fearless'. On Metacritic, the film has a rank of 19 out of a 100 based on 11 critics, indicating 'generally unfavorable reviews'.

The film received mostly negative reviews, garnering a score of 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, which summarized it as 'slickly made but mostly unpleasant'. Amy Brenneman as Carol, Nancy's psychotherapist.Rufus Sewell as Albert Stockwell, Nancy's husband.The relationship between Louis and Nancy straddles the thin line between pleasure and pain, crossing over into a film that is as emotional as it is unnerving. Nancy's husband Albert is left with an empty house, filled with only the memory of his wife's unbearable loneliness and a final, endless understanding of how bleak life could be. For Nancy, solace can only come from death, for Louis, it can only come from Nancy.

Together, they journey through the darkest recesses of the human mind before finding solace in each other's arms. Beyond therapy, beyond medication, beyond feeling, Nancy is left with the only coping mechanism she ever knew, violence. Louis is a quiet dispenser of pleasure, Nancy is the mechanism set to self-destruct. Dead to everything except painful pleasure, an unhappily married woman, Nancy, leaves her silent husband behind to meet a fellow broken soul in search of a final release.

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