3 Women

3 Women (1977) is Robert Altman's dream-logic psychological drama — watch online on iFILM. Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek play two women whose identities slowly begin to bleed into each other under the bleached California desert sun.

Pinky is young, wide-eyed and new to a rehabilitation spa in the Mojave. She moves in with Millie, a co-worker who talks constantly and assumes everyone around her is fascinated by her life — when in fact her neighbors can barely remember her name. A third woman, Willie, works in near-silence painting unsettling murals at the bottom of a pool. As the summer stretches on, something shifts: Pinky starts shedding who she was, Millie loses her footing, and the line between the three women stops being visible.

Altman wrote the script from a dream he had. The result sits closer to Ingmar Bergman than to anything with a conventional plot. Duvall took the Best Actress prize at Cannes in 1977. A singular film — not easy, but unlike almost anything else from that era. Stream 3 Women (1977) on iFILM.