Better the second time. I didn’t realize how great Maria Bello was the first time around, nor did I consciously register how subversive Howard Shore’s score is. My sole criticism of this film when I saw it in the theater was that it was a little “straight” for David Cronenberg. I take that back. This is genius; at 90 minutes, a perfect film.
From the imdb:
For the sex scene on the stairs, David Cronenberg was concerned about the two actors getting hurt on the hard wooden steps. He asked his stunt man whether or not he had any stunt pads to soften up the stairs. The stunt man laughed, saying that in the twenty years he had been working as a stunt man, no director had ever asked him for stunt pads for a sex scene. Pads were not used for most of the scene however, and in the shot when Edie is naked on the bed with bruises visible on her back, make-up was used to hide the amount of bruises that Maria Bello received from the scene.