The 1995 film adaptation of Stephen King's 1992 novel, Dolores Claiborne, was shot on-location around Nova Scotia. It starred Kathy Bates as the titular character, a domestic help on the (fictional) Little Tall Island, off the coast of Maine.
Among the most memorable scenes in the movie is when Dolores and her daughter Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh) take a ferry crossing between Long and Brier Islands. As Selena gets sicker and sicker, her mother becomes increasingly worried and ill herself.
While this is a dreary location for a movie, it does a fine job of capturing the bleakness that pervades Dolores' life. Hackford positions the house out on a promontory that offers no cosiness, which is how she's depicted in the book; it's a stark, sterile place where Dolores has been living for over two decades.
She's lived in this house for so long that she knows most of the local residents by name, and she also knows their stories. The movie does an excellent job of revealing the complexities of classism and sexism that pervade this small town, particularly through Dolores' own status as a maid who "bites her tongue" when she wants to raise her voice or defy her employer.
She isn't above using this position of authority to her advantage, however - especially when she finds out that her husband Joe St. George had cleaned out her savings account for his own use. This acts as another justification for her hatred of him, and a plan for his death.
