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.

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