Downloading Nancy has become one of those films indelibly scarred by the knee-jerk reaction of the first people to see it; if you know it at all, you know that it was hated at Sundance. I wasn’t at the infamous press screening where, as Michael Lerman wrote in a piece on SpoutBlog late last year, “Audiences fled the theater mid-picture as Nancy and her new companion engaged in depressingly violent sexual activity, padded with an icky sensitivity that makes each viewer feel like they should go home and shower after just being present at the screening.” Watching it 18 months later — alone, so doubly removed from the kind of festival fever that can cause the first opinion to become the only opinion that matters — I can understand how a viewer could have been scared away by the film’s synopsis (frankly, the equation of unhappy housewife + internet + S & M = salvation is probably what kept me away from that press screening in the first place.) It’s also understandable that the film’s first scene of brutal (although by no means explicitly shot) sexually violent game-playing would send viewers to the exits, although that seems slightly less reasonable for people who watch movies for a living. What I can’t understand, is how anyone could make it through the full film and not have some kind of admiration for the way Downloading Nancy is shot, scored and staged; for the vanity-free performance by Maria Bello and the seductively morally ambiguous work of Jason Patrick; and for the magic trick it works, lending unspeakable trauma a kind of grace.

Bello plays the titular middle-American wife, married to Albert (Rufus Sewell), a cold golf fanatic who seems to take pleasure in denying her every basic human courtesy. Scarred mentally, emotionally and physically from childhood sexual abuse that left her infertile, Nancy divides her waking hours between S&M chat rooms and self-mutilation. If Albert notices either of his wife’s destructive addictions, he doesn’t protest or intervene; when she leaves him to carry out her own final solution with internet boyfriend Louis (Jason Patrick), Albert seems oblivious to the reasons why, and doesn’t call the police. Louis and Nancy’s days together are intercut with the story of what happens later, when Louis shows up at Albert’s door to force him to deal with his missing wife.

Just as Nancy seems to have distinct personalities (one is simplistic, childlike, probably frozen emotionally at the age she was abused, another is bold, no bullshit), the film can be disorientingly uneven in its tone. Director Johan Renck essentially builds Nancy and Albert’s reality out of an aggregation of overwrought kitsch — most notably, the faux-putting green in Albert’s basement hideaway — and so what seem like occasional lapses into deadpan moments of fantasy aren’t always productive in contrast. Heavily art directed for unpleasantness, Downloading Nancy sometimes seems to fetishize the ugliness of its backdrop. Thankfully, the great Christopher Doyle’s camera never eroticizes or romanticizes the actual sex and/or violence on screen, allowing Nancy to go beyond the fact of the taboo acts to locate drama their causes and effects.

The reality that Renck does get right is in the relationship between Nancy and Louis, which slowly accumulates emotional layers that transcend the gritty details of their extreme sexual pact. Renck never exploits his characters’ desires for effect, and in fact, seen after the winking shock of the sexual violence in Antichrist, Downloading Nancy’s evocation of the relationship between pain and release feels shockingly sympathetic and respectful. In convincingly making a case that true love is being able to ask for something and get it –– and not passing judgment whether the request is for a gentle kiss or a lit cigarette to the genitals –– this dreary, disturbing, creepy but undeniably compelling portrait of a suicidal, mentally ill woman and her lover/would-be killer ultimately plays like a tragic romance.