Primal fear DVD 1996 / Directed by Gregory Hoblit / Starring: Richard Gere, Laura Linney, John Mahoney, Alfre Woodard

UPC 5014437812339

REGION 2 PAL DVD

MADE IN EU

AUDIO: English 5.1, German 5.1, Czech 2.1, Hungarian 2.1

SUBTITLES: English, English HOH, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Turkish

TOTAL RUNTIME: 125 minutes

English Summary:

Primal Fear is a 1996 American legal thriller film, based on William Diehl's 1993 novel of the same name and directed by Gregory Hoblit.

The film tells the story of a Chicago defense attorney who believes that his altar boy client is not guilty of murdering an influential Catholic archbishop.

Martin Vail (Richard Gere) is a Chicago defense attorney who loves the spotlight, and does everything that he can to get his high-profile clients acquitted on legal technicalities. One day he sees a news report about the arrest of Aaron Stampler (Edward Norton), a 19-year-old altar boy from Kentucky with a severe stutter, who is accused of brutally murdering the beloved Archbishop Rushman (Stanley Anderson). Vail jumps at the chance to represent the young man, pro bono. During his meetings at the County jail with Stampler, Vail comes to believe that his client is innocent, much to the chagrin of Vail's former lover, prosecutor Janet Venable (Laura Linney).

As the trial begins, Vail discovers that powerful civic leaders, including the corrupt state's attorney John Shaughnessy (John Mahoney) recently lost millions of dollars in real estate investments due to a decision by the Archbishop not to develop on certain church-owned lands. The Archbishop secretly received numerous death threats as a result. Following a tip from a former altar boy about a videotape involving Stampler, Vail makes a search of the Archbishop's apartment and finds a VHS tape shot by Rushman that shows Stampler being forced to have sex with another teenage altar boy and a teenage girl named Linda Forbes. Vail is now in a dilemma: introducing this evidence would make Stampler more sympathetic to the jury, but it would also give him a motive for the murder—which Venable has been unable to establish.

When Vail confronts his client and accuses him of having lied, Stampler breaks down crying and suddenly transforms into a new persona: a violent sociopath who calls himself “Roy.” "Roy" confesses to the murder of the Archbishop, and threatens Vail. When this incident is over Stampler once again becomes passive and shy, and appears to have no recollection of the personality switch - what he calls having "lost time." Molly Arrington (Frances McDormand), the psychiatrist examining Stampler who witnessed the entire event, is convinced that he has dissociative identity disorder, caused by years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his father and Archbishop Rushman, respectively. Vail does not want to hear this, because he knows that he cannot enter an insanity plea during an ongoing trial.

Cast