Sliver

Watching the Walls Watch Back

A Manhattan apartment movie is always, at some level, about power. Who gets to look, who gets looked at, who can afford the view, who’s trapped inside the frame. Sliver understands that premise almost too well, which may be why it feels both slickly confident and faintly embarrassed by its own obsession. Phillip Noyce sets the story in one of those polished towers where every surface gleams and every hallway seems designed to make you feel slightly implicated.

You don’t so much enter the building as submit to it.

What interests me most about Sliver is that it arrives in 1993 with the scent of a certain kind of early-’90s adult thriller — the kind made after Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct taught studios that desire, surveillance, and murder could be folded into a single glossy package. Noyce had already shown, in films like Dead Calm and Patriot Games, that he knew how to stage tension with a straight face.

Here, though, he’s working in a more lubricated register: mirrors, hidden cameras, rich-people interiors, the whole paranoid architecture of urban intimacy. The movie sits right in that late-analog moment when the fear wasn’t yet about phones and feeds, but about the apartment itself. Your landlord.

Your neighbor. The little red light you didn’t notice.

There’s a lot of talk around Sliver about its reputation as a notorious Sharon Stone vehicle, and that’s not wrong, but it can flatten what’s actually interesting here. Stone, coming off Basic Instinct, was in the middle of that strange, punishing stretch when Hollywood seemed to want her to be both the fantasy and the commentary on the fantasy. She plays Carly Norris with a kind of wary, professional intelligence: not cold exactly, but alert, as if she’s learned that desire is usually a negotiation and rarely a gift.

You can see it in the way she moves through rooms — not gliding, not strutting, just measuring exits. That physical self-possession matters because the film keeps trying to turn her into an object of scrutiny, and Stone keeps insisting on a mind behind the body.

William Baldwin, meanwhile, brings a smoother, less interesting kind of menace — which is useful, actually. He’s all polished entitlement and easy access, the sort of man who seems born with a keycard. His performance doesn’t need psychological depths so much as a particular vacancy, the hint that charm and invasion may be cousins.

If the film has a weakness, it’s that some of its supporting male energy feels like it came out of a catalog for affluent predators. Tom Berenger gets to roughen the edges a bit, and CCH Pounder, as ever, has the lovely ability to suggest that she’s already seen the whole game and is waiting for the rest of us to catch up.