Animus Magazine presents “Bad Timing” w/ Jeremy Thomas intro (schedule permitting)

When a young American woman (Theresa Russell) ends up in a Vienna hospital after a suicide attempt, a local police inspector (Harvey Keitel) seeks answers from her lover, an American psychoanalyst (Art Garfunkel), and begins to piece together the story of their stormy affair.

“A sick film made by sick people for sick people". Thus was Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing described upon its original release in 1980 by UK distributor the Rank Organisation, whose executives were so shocked that they removed the company’s logo from the film’s opening credits. Nearly a decade after appearing in Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge (1971) – screened by Animus Magazine at the PCC in 2024 – singer-songwriter Art Garfunkel returned in front of the camera for another nightmarish deconstruction of toxic relationship dynamics. Nicolas Roeg’s jagged, non-linear storytelling captures the dizzying highs and crushing lows of an obsessive romance already blown to pieces at the start of the film. As we gather the shards through heartbreaking flashbacks, it is impossible not to cut ourselves on the sharp edges of a love that may have been doomed from the start. 

Legendary film producer Jeremy Thomas (Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast among others) will introduce this 35mm screening of Bad Timing, his first of three collaborations with Nicolas Roeg.