This story of mad illicit love should be great. The credentials of the filmmakers and cast are enough to get most people excited. The director is David Mackenzie (of Young Adam fame), it's based on a novel by Patrick McGrath (whose Spider was adapted into the critically acclaimed David Cronenberg film), with a screenplay co-written by Patrick Marber (author of the successful play and film Closer), topped off by an impressive cast lead by Natasha Richardson and Ian McKellen. Unfortunately it's not that great at all.

During his childhood, McGrath's father was one of the head psychiatrists at Broadmoor, Britain's well-known hospital for the criminally insane. He apparently remembers rumours about a doctor's wife engaging in an affair with one of the patients, and it is this childhood memory that provides the central conceit of Asylum. Richardson plays the very sexy, bored fifties housewife Stella to Hugh Bonneville's Max, a strait-laced psychiatrist employed as the deputy superintendent of a remote asylum. The couple, along with their pre-pubescent son Charlie, go to live in the grounds where the marriage, seemingly already difficult, begins to tear at the seams.

With hints of fifties glumness similar to Neil Jordan's, The End of the Affair (1999, originally filmed in 1954) and Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven (2002, inspired by 1955 Douglas Sirk classic All That Heaven Allows) Stella feels isolated from the other devoted wives, and fails to live up to her husband's expectations of how a lady should behave. To counter her boredom and dissatisfaction she begins an affair with Edgar (Marton Csokas), one of the very attractive patients resident at the asylum for a condition termed 'severe personality disorder characterised by morbid jealousy', which means that he beheaded his wife in a fit of jealous rage. From there things unsurprisingly fall apart, with dire consequences.

There film has moments of excellence: the chemistry between Richardson and Csokas, and Bonneville's unobtrusive portrayal of a weak, emotionally disengaged man out of his depth. But most of this takes place in the first act. The main flaw of the film is a lack of exposition regarding the character of Cleave (McKellen), the debonair psychiatrist treating Edgar. It turns out that Cleave is ambitious, with his eye not only on Max's job, but his wife as well. Sadly, none of this is made clear until the film is on its last legs and the central relationships have already reached their climactic heights. Perhaps it is Cleave's resemblance to an 'old queen' as Edgar puts it, that deadens these revelations, or maybe it's just the overwrought script and bad editing that make him ultimately incredible as a Machiavellian paramour. Either way, the failure to communicate Cleave as a dark and destructive force in the lives of the younger lovers (albeit within the moral Universe of an asylum) stops the audience from rooting for their happiness, and instead we are just left, pointlessly, to try to comprehend Stella's stupidity and self-destruction. What starts out as a classic British gothic tale transforms into a soap opera muddle in which everyone is psychologically challenged without any alternative frame of reference, or indeed a reason to care about any of it.

Rated 16 (see IFCO website for details)
Asylum is released on 9th September 2005.
Asylum – Official website