Asylum: Critic Reviews

Nothing wrecks the mood of a high-toned British period piece about erotic obsession quicker than an unintentional laugh. In which case, prepare for Asylum to be derailed by snorts in all the wrong places.

In the dreary, claustrophobic drama Asylum, Natasha Richardson plays a married Englishwoman who falls for a loony-bin hunk.

There's nothing remotely seething -- or sympathetic or provocative -- about this overstuffed movie, which bears the unmistakable signs of a film too in love with its own fetishistic production values.

I know it's all about erotic obsession, not logic. Still, it's just so darn annoying to watch this attractive, seemingly smart woman throw her life away for some (admittedly rather hot) sex in the greenhouse.

The morbid interiority of McGrath's novel has been turned into distressed gloss, and while it's awfully nice to look at, it never once comes close to the dangerous emotions of the real thing.

Mackenzie and Marber opt for an anonymous viewpoint of clinical detachment, which generates about the same psychodramatic tension as reading the DSM-IV.

Mackenzie takes too many such shortcuts in a complex psychological story.

Asylum is a semi-watchable, lurid melodrama. But it could have been a dynamic, probing psycho-drama.

The premise of the tale is thus grounded in an experience of some grit, yet the result, onscreen, is a loose compound of the predictable and the implausible.

An overwrought Gothic melodrama that has a nice first act before it descends into shameless absurdity.

Even at its most melodramatic, Asylum plays as if someone had slipped a pair of restraining devices on the material and then yelled 'action.'

Mad passion and marital ennui collide with calamitous results in Asylum.

Once characters' actions lose credibility, it's hard to empathize with them, no matter how well the roles are played.

Patrick McGrath's screenplay, based on his novel, has moments big and small, delivered in appropriate dollops of awfulness.

The makers of Asylum pretend they're making an art movie, and although the film has the trappings, the story is mostly Hollywood.

A leanly structured, richly detailed and artistically thrilling work that is one of the most important films of the year.

A psychological thriller requiring substantial suspension of disbelief.

Asylum had promise. But it's bad enough to make one wonder just who had the loose screws -- the characters, or the people who filmed them?

Asylum is all very formal, detached, and, regrettably, sane.

It's too over-the-top, too lurid and at times simply too silly to represent any kind of valid commentary on the repressive '50s or the way in which institutions tend to destroy rather than cure.

offers a bleak vision of the Fifties, where an outbreak of passion or an artistic impulse would be quickly subjected, like any other madness, to containment.

A little like Jack the Ripper in outer space.

Despite a superb cast, artful set design and seductive cinematography, Asylum remains a lovingly lensed missed opportunity.