I think I disagree with every positive thing I see written about this movie. I'm sorry I took a chance on Puffball.The story follows a pretty Irish girl, Liffey, while she oversees the completion of her dream home in a remote Irish village. It is a very woodsy area, and there are plenty of scenes in thick forests and muddy farmyards. So it is a very "earthy" movie, and that is what probably drew me to it. Very early on, however, the movie also injects a mystical tone, as we see that Liffey has neighbors who practice some sort of voodoo witchcraft.The tension builds when it is established that Mabs Tucker wants a baby, but is told she is too old to conceive. She turns to her mother, who believes that Liffey's arrival in the area has upset the natural order of things, and that when Liffey becomes pregnant, it is the baby that was "meant" for Mabs which she is carrying. Throughout this exposition, we are shown close-ups of mushrooms as big as a human head with images of a fetus juxtaposed over it. There seems to be some attempt at symbolism, but when the movie was over, I still hadn't figured out what. I was also surprised to see Mabs serving one of these giant puffballs for dinner, carving it like a roast.One of the problems I had with this movie is that there is enough human drama that I feel like they didn't need the mystical subplot. Liffey gets drunk one night and has relations with Mabs' husband (which was initiated intentionally by Mabs and her mother), and through a series of circumstances, believes she has become pregnant by him. It turns out that when she had gotten pregnant earlier in the movie by her fiancé, she conceived twins, one of which she later miscarried. So the surviving child wasn't a result of the drunken hookup (this is established because the fetus is too far along to have been conceived when that happened).Now doesn't that sound like enough twists to fill one movie? Well, they tried to pack much more in there, and I didn't think it worked out very well. Mabs' daughter eventually tells Liffey that her family is using magic against her, and it is also revealed to her fiancé she cheated. Everything comes to a climax at the moment Liffey goes into labor and needs to get to the hospital immediately for an emergency c-section. Except that Mabs won't help her out of spite, and her husband is busy having a fistfight with the guy she cheated with. Will she make it? I thought the ending was very anticlimactic, and that is a big part of the reason I rated this so low. It also got a bit tiresome seeing Liffey with blood running down her legs three or four times, gripping her stomach in pain. A scene like that if effective when used once. The director ends up looking a bit overindulgent, and the nearly two-hour running time doesn't help much either.In closing, I also want to say that a lot of the praise I see written about this movie seems to be from reviewers who end up sounding very pretentious. So if you like to ascribe meaning to vague, symbolic imagery, or you like to focus on attributes like "the architectural quality of film" (???), you may have lots to enjoy with Puffball.

Ever since director Roeg's career went into irreversible decline in the mid- 1980s, he has intermittently been attempting to recapture shades of his former glory and this is surely another effort in that vein – what with its mystical/architectural themes and emphasis on sex, down to an irrelevant cameo by Donald Sutherland (from his masterpiece DON'T LOOK NOW [1973]). However, the result is only mildly compelling and as muddled as ever; at least, leading lady Kelly Reilly is most appealing – and physically reminiscent of Candy Clark, who had featured in the director's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976). Like Julie Christie in DON'T LOOK NOW itself, he has recruited an icon of the Swinging Sixties, Rita Tushingham, to play the misguided 'witch' after the heroine (who is renovating the cottage in which the old lady's son had died in a fire years earlier). Aiding her in the 'cause' is Tushingham's middle-aged but still attractive daughter (Miranda Richardson, delivering the film's outstanding performance) and the latter's own reluctant offspring. Reilly is impregnated by her fiancé (who then summarily departs for New York) but miscarries soon after; realizing she is going to conceive once more some time later, the girl fears the father may be Richardson's younger husband (and so do Tushingham & Co.) – whom Reilly had seduced while drunk at her place! However, it turns out that she had originally conceived twins and one managed to survive the ordeal. Anyway, Tushingham's clan professes to befriend Reilly (while mixing disgusting potions ostensibly to assimilate her pregnancy onto Richardson, though the girl eventually exposes the others' scheme) – including giving a dinner at their house where the titular dish (dubbed "The Devil's Eyeball", actually this film's subtitle in the U.S.) is served; at the end of the day, in spite of Tushingham's death, the situation is happily resolved for the 'witches' as well when Richardson herself finally bears a son. For the record, among the remaining Roeg titles I have yet to catch up with, I own the following: INSIGNIFICANCE (1985), TRACK 29 (1988), SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1989; TV) and COLD HEAVEN (1992)

There were a lot of talented (at one point) people involved in this movie . But more to the point, what was the point? Maybe all those who claim to have read the book (really?) could explain what these magical puffballs are. I didn't see one person mention them and yet they are prominently displayed. Just hocus pocus?Rita Tushingham? Well this was no Taste of Honey. Miranda Richardson? This was no Tom and Viv. Roeg was great at one point, but now, I guess from celestial heights he's a Man who's Fallen to Earth.I will give him one thing... he knows how to execute a violent sex scene, far more about eroticism than love and ejaculation as opposed to ecstasy.Music was challenging at times and other times distracting. Camera work was fine much of the time (particularly with the Odin ring thing) but uneven also.Roeg still has an "eye." But now he needs an assistant for continuity. The plot was nonsensical.

I watched Puffball last night, as a huge Fay Weldon fan who read the book quite a few years ago. I was surprised to discover it was a 2007 film, as the subject matter, and the atmosphere of the pic, would have suggested something many years older.Still, I thought it was quite faithful to the intent of the book, and is, despite some comments, very much a women's film. It deals with elemental forces, and the complexity of women's nature and women's power. The men are little more than sperm donors, penile life support systems to be acted on by women's emotions and a separate women's nature, almost echoing, (or prefiguring, more likely) some of Jane Campion's observations in The Piano, among others.This has always been the heart of Fay Weldon's work, a poke in the eye of naivité, of the "Eyes Wide Shut" variety, about the nature of women. The film doesn't really add to this narrative, but it doesn't diminish it either, which is saying something for a film adaptation of a novel, made by an auteur to boot.