A housemaid falls in love with Dr. Henry Jekyll and his darkly mysterious counterpart, Mr. Edward Hyde.A housemaid falls in love with Dr. Henry Jekyll and his darkly mysterious counterpart, Mr. Edward Hyde.A housemaid falls in love with Dr. Henry Jekyll and his darkly mysterious counterpart, Mr. Edward Hyde.
- Awards
- 6 nominations
Ciarán Hinds
- Sir Danvers Carew
- (as Ciaran Hinds)
- Director
- Writers
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Julia Roberts Through the Years
Julia Roberts Through the Years
Take a look back at Julia Roberts' movie career in photos.
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaTim Burton was originally set to direct this after he completed filming Ed Wood (1994), but subsequently dropped out of the production of "Mary Reilly" out of anger towards Peter Guber for putting "Ed Wood", a passion project, into turnaround.
- GoofsMary's accent disappears & reappears several times during the film.
- Quotes
Mary Reilly: He said you have an illness. What kind of an illness?
Dr. Henry Jekyll: You might call it a fracture in my soul, something which left me with a taste for oblivion.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Siskel & Ebert: City Hall/The Late Shift/Happy Gilmore (1996)
Featured review
Eerily memorable
OK, so this film was trashed by the critics... and I would bet a fortune that the average MTV generation movie-goer will practically fall asleep watching it - but I posit that their trouble with this film says more about them than it does about Frear's Gothic tale.
There are weaknesses - above all the fact that everyone else (including Julia Roberts ) has an accent but Malkovitch refuses to even attempt one. What's an American accent doing in the middle of all this? Malkovitch also seems to be channeling his own performance in Frear's masterpiece, Dangerous Liaisons - but if you haven't seen that film you should love what he does in this one.
But other than that, I found the slow pace to be totally gripping... The entire story is told from the viewpoint of Mary Reilly, and I have never seen Julia Roberts do a better job than here. She is wonderfully effective... it is worth watching this film only for her performance. But it is also worth watching because of the attention to period detail. You really get a feeling of what it must have been like to live in the 19th century. The manners, the utensils, the class differences...the psycho-sexual straight-jacket.
I will not give any details about the film - I'll let those who watch it discover it for themselves. But I would like to say one thing about the pace. This is not an action film, it is not even a horror film in the traditional sense. It is mainly a story of discovery - dealing with the slow realization of hidden desires and uncontrolled motivations; as such it should not - nay, could not be done at a quicker pace. It's really too bad that fewer and fewer people today seem to be capable of watching something that is subtle and slow. The loss is theirs.
There are weaknesses - above all the fact that everyone else (including Julia Roberts ) has an accent but Malkovitch refuses to even attempt one. What's an American accent doing in the middle of all this? Malkovitch also seems to be channeling his own performance in Frear's masterpiece, Dangerous Liaisons - but if you haven't seen that film you should love what he does in this one.
But other than that, I found the slow pace to be totally gripping... The entire story is told from the viewpoint of Mary Reilly, and I have never seen Julia Roberts do a better job than here. She is wonderfully effective... it is worth watching this film only for her performance. But it is also worth watching because of the attention to period detail. You really get a feeling of what it must have been like to live in the 19th century. The manners, the utensils, the class differences...the psycho-sexual straight-jacket.
I will not give any details about the film - I'll let those who watch it discover it for themselves. But I would like to say one thing about the pace. This is not an action film, it is not even a horror film in the traditional sense. It is mainly a story of discovery - dealing with the slow realization of hidden desires and uncontrolled motivations; as such it should not - nay, could not be done at a quicker pace. It's really too bad that fewer and fewer people today seem to be capable of watching something that is subtle and slow. The loss is theirs.
helpful•102
- pogostiks
- Mar 21, 2008
Details
Box office
- Budget
- $47,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $5,707,094
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $2,812,620
- Feb 25, 1996
- Gross worldwide
- $12,379,402
- Runtime1 hour 48 minutes
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.85 : 1
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