As many of us get into our seventh week of sheltering at home, I thought I would watch another classic film about the sudden onset of a mysterious illness: Todd Haynes’ 1995 masterpiece, Safe.

Haynes’ second feature film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival to strong reviews, but over the decades, it has grown into a bona fide American Independent classic.

Safe is a different kind of disease movie. Unlike Outbreak and Contagion, which are both about clear novel pathogens, Safe is about being allergic to the world around you, like fumes and chemicals from everyday products.

Safe is not just a horrifying disease movie, but a deft blend of several genres.

It is, as the antiquated term calls it, “a woman’s picture,” a genre that would become a calling card for Haynes with his later films Far From Heaven and Carol, and the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. The film delves into the lives and concerns of women in a way that more masculine genres ignore.

The lead character in Safe, Carol (Julianne Moore, in what is still one of her best performances), is an empty vessel of a person. She lives in Reagan’s idyllic suburban America — the film, though made and released in 1995, takes place in the late 1980s.

Carol dutifully keeps up her unspoken spousal obligations: entertaining clients at dinners, entertaining the neighborhood wives, and keeping up with her trips to aerobics classics. Even before she is befallen by illness, Carol is already afflicted with a deep sense of unfulfillment.

In one of the most famous scenes in the movie, she becomes enraged when she finds a furniture company has delivered a black couch instead of a teal one: “I would never order black, it doesn’t go with anything we have.”

It is an unsettling moment of conviction from a woman who, so far, had barely spoken above a whisper. This is the most pressing thing in her life to get emotional over.

Slowly but surely, Carol begins to experience fits where she is unable to catch her breath. They start as a mild inconvenience but grow to be incredibly distressing.

Carol is forced to convince the men in her life, her husband and doctor, that something is wrong with her, even though nothing abnormal shows up in her bloodwork. She has a disease that no one believes is real.

Carol’s friends also start to question whether or not she is physically ill or if she is, instead, suffering mentally. They start to shun her when she is no longer able to keep fulfilling the social contract of demure housewifery that their circle demands.

Safe shows us the human ego prevents us from grappling with the severity of such illnesses. Carol’s friends would rather think she is losing her mind than think she has some hypersensivity to the chemicals in the world, something which could affect them. They would rather ignore her and the problem altogether.

Safe is famously a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic. Haynes is a gay man, whose first film, Poison, was an anthology triptych, of which one of the three stories is another horror movie about disease. That episode was a 1950s B-movie homage, where a doctor is infected with an unknown disease which makes him a social pariah.

Both movies are about people who become ill and are abandoned by the people in their lives. The shame of disease is something that rarely gets discussed and I don’t think there has ever been another movie made on the subject.

There is a sense of pride to never getting sick because it means you are properly taking care of yourself. Particularly with the American individualist ethos, it becomes all too easy to believe that you can only get sick through your own faults.

The judgment comes all too easily. This was particularly evident in the way the government and media treated the AIDS crisis in the early years, when it predominantly affected gay men. To the average heterosexual American, AIDS was something that happened to “them,” not to “us.”

Safe forces us to confront is how small and defenseless any individual person is, that anyone is susceptible to a novel illness.

Carol has done everything right but she gets sick anyway. Haynes shows us her frailty in the filmmaking, often framing her as a tiny body in a huge house, in the back of a gym class, among a group of women at a party, etc.

People’s egos may cause them to think they are strong, but the filmmaking here reminds us how fragile every existence on earth really is.

This fragility would be best remembered in our current times, where the measures put in place to protect us from the coronavirus inevitably feel like an overreaction to those who do not fall ill.

Halfway through the movie, Carol moves to a new-age rehabilitation center Wrenwood, which is a pointed comment on the kinds of fraudulent thinking of some “gurus” at the time, proclaiming that people only get sick because they do not love themselves enough.

Several writers and speakers enriched themselves spouting such nonsense, including 2020 presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson.

Carol internalizes the message that she is sick because she does not want to be well.

The end of 1995’s Safe shows Carol staring into the mirror (actually, staring into the camera directly at the audience). She tells herself, “I love you.” She says it over and over, with different emphases. “I love you. I love you. I really love you.” It is a deeply unsettling portrait of a woman who has been sold a lie about how to regain her health.

By this point in the film, Carol has found she cannot stay in even a normal cabin at Wrenwood because the fumes from the road provide too much for her system, so she has moved into a pristine sterile igloo.

This detail is subtle in its insidiousness and irony — she moved to this camp to get away from modern chemicals but they are so omnipresent that she can only get away from them by ensconcing herself in this chemically produced plastic shell.

She does not return to nature as her disease might suggest is the right cure. Instead, there is no path to be safe in the natural world.