E-Mail This Article to a Friend ASYLUM

97 MINUTES | BOSTON COMMON + FENWAY + FRESH POND + CIRCLE/CHESTNUT HILL + SUBURBS

Patrick McGrath writes dreary books that make dreary movies. When adapted by a great director like David Cronenberg (Spider), they’re pretentious and dreary; when adapted by a lesser talent like David Mackenzie, they’re dull and dreary. In dull dreary post–World War II England, dull dreary psychiatrist Max Raphael (Hugh Bonneville) takes a post at a creepy asylum for the criminally insane. This being the ’50s, his vivacious wife, Stella (Natasha Richardson), is left to provide the fruitcake at the Christmas dance. Enter dark and glowering Edgar (Marton Csokas, a poor man’s Clive Owen), a mad sculptor incarcerated for murdering his wife, and a montage of surreptitious liaisons ensues. When Edgar escapes, so does Stella, but this brief outburst of desire takes its dutiful dull dreary toll. Both book and novel gamely tout a pre-feminist message of doomed liberation, and Ian McKellen brings a tart portrayal to his role as an insidious shrink, but Asylum evokes the claustrophobic tedium of the title enclosure.