Product Details

• Actors: Julia Roberts, Patrick Bergin, Kevin Anderson, Elizabeth Lawrence, Kyle Secor
• Directors: Joseph Ruben
• Writers: Nancy Price, Ronald Bass
• Producers: C. Tad Devlin, Jeffrey Chernov, Joel Chernoff, Leonard Goldberg, Michael E. Steele
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: 20th Century Fox
• VHS Release Date: April 22, 1997
• Run Time: 99 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (90 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302096227
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #99,778 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

This 1991 thriller by Joseph Ruben (True Believer) works up to a point: Julia Roberts plays an abused wife who fakes her death and starts anew under a different identity in Iowa. Her psychopathic husband (Patrick Bergin) figures it out and stalks her and her new boyfriend (Kevin Anderson). The best part of the film is the moody isolation of Roberts's life with Bergin. Ruben ingeniously stakes out the story by presenting what looks like an ideal life between the two--a nice house on the ocean, a seemingly healthy sex life, etc.--and then, whammo! Vital to the plot but less interesting is everything afterward, but that's less an inherent script problem than it is obvious studio pressure to push Roberts as a cute star. There's even a sequence where the actress tries on a series of hats while Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" plays on the soundtrack. Such insistent valentines to Roberts destroys most of Ruben's momentum and the film's credibility, and the project never quite recovers. --Tom Keogh

Product Description

Julia Roberts tries to escape an abusive husband by faking her death. But eventually her past catches up with her in this suspenseful and scary drama.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars GUILTY PLEASURE, June 28, 2000

By 

R. Penola (NYC, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sleeping With the Enemy [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Joseph Ruben has fashioned a by-the-numbers, glossy, engrossing, if trashy and predictable, thriller. It is imminently watchable, of course, and features the mega-watt smile of our fave, Julia Roberts, who improbably dons theatrical costumes in the midst of a semi-breakdown to the tune of Brown-Eyed Girl. The men around Julia, both her over-the-top psychopathic husband and her would-be new, soft boyfriend (Patrick Bergin and Kevin Andersen, respectively) are completely dispensable, and Ruben knows this: he keeps us monumentally focused on the beguiling Ms. Roberts throughout. It is easy to forget and forgive lapses in credibility (there are many), and the opening twenty minutes have a glossy, antiseptic queasiness about them that seem to be setting up a much more deft and daring thriller. All of that vanishes, along with common sense, but it hardly matters. This movie is one you can watch over and over and over again, a bunch of chips nearby: it moves quickly, harmlessly, and gives you what you want when you just don't feel much like thinking.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A must see suspenser!, July 19, 1999

By 

Tara (CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sleeping With the Enemy [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I remember seeing this movie when it came out in the theater and jumping out of my seat. The cruel, punishing and sadistic husband of Julia's matches Julia's scenes scene for scene in his acting. Onw watches this movie and wonders how could a man with all he has, money, a multimillion dollar house, and a perfect, beautiful wife like Julia treat her like that??? The only problems with this movie is that Julia flees only to end up in a house in Iowa for $700 dollars a month!!! How can she afford that with no job? And how did she get a job in the library even with that annoying bearded guys help with no social security number?? Of course we all know that a big scary house was necessary to build thrills and suspense and that it does! The ending is TERRIFIC as is the acting.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scissor-Cut Look at Abuse, April 21, 2001

By 

Wilmarie (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sleeping With the Enemy [VHS] (VHS Tape)

With the beginning scene in "Sleeping With the Enemy" of a nice, handsome husband and a beautiful, smiling wife living in a lovely, rich house, this movie soon breaks the stereotype perception of an abusive relationship by showing that everything that glitters is not necessarily gold.

Julia Roberts, with a combination of a sense of planning and cleverness, fear and hope, and a desperate will to survive, does the only thing she can - she leaves while faking her own death. (Any abused man or woman will probably be mesmerized by some of the scenes and the feelings evoked in this intense movie.)

The new lifestyle she slowly, but surely creates for herself, against the backdrop of her husband piecing together her escape and his savage determination to find her creates a savvy suspense thriller that could be a classic in anyone's home movie library.