The film does not just contain assumptions, it is built entirely on their foundation. Just like any thriller or detective. In reality, their plots are absolutely impossible, they are built on "special" rules of office work and psychology, which in life simply do not exist.
Everyone here is familiar with everyone, and has a gloomy erotic background of relationships. At the same time, a whole bunch of people are obsessed murderers or obsessed cops who can not sleep peacefully, thinking every minute about their professional. Virtually every character has killed and/or wants to kill someone, so many killers per square meter in one movie. Hell, there's even secondary killers here! And everyone wants to kill so much that opponents who come to visit every day are not at all a reason to lay low. But even more than killing, all the local characters want to have sex – so much so that they forget everything. Yes, it’s a good thing, but when you have sex on one side and your reputation, your career, your freedom and your life on the other, and the characters choose the former, it’s hard to believe that story. For some incredible reason, the authorship of a book describing a real murder is considered an alibi – this is absurd. Finally, the series of non-random clues and awesome twists in the style of "everything fits" is so twisted that the diagnosis is clear - literary. Well, there is no such dense scheme of events in life, it is impossible.
To all this, we add a pseudo-intrigue – the viewer knows from the very beginning who the culprit is. And they try to drag his whole movie by the nose, so that in the end everything turned out exactly as we thought at first. Maybe this is such an idea that the viewer, together with the investigator, went from confidence to doubt, but in my opinion the number did not work. The heroine Sharon Stone behaves so brazenly, insanely and defiantly that no one would ever believe in her innocence.
The disadvantages are big, but this is the genre, and there is apparently nothing to do about it. However, we must admit: all this could fall apart, but the film is firmly shot down, the acting is excellent, bright, felt, the direction is strong, each scene is set so as to cause interest and tension. I found only one frankly weak line in the film - when a partner digs up that Elizabeth worked in the same office with some doctor. I did not understand what it meant or why it was in history.
And if anyone does not understand the outcome, it is both to blame. The two lesbians, who did not share their status at university, continued to ruin each other’s lives for many years. It is not clear what crimes each of them committed, but both have blood on their hands.
P.S. Basically, it's a movie about Michael Douglas being too good for a bunch of woman maniacs to kill him.