Asylum
asks why you always hurt the one you love.
***image1***
Psychiatrist Max Raphael (Hugh Bonneville) and his elegant, restless wife Stella (Natasha Richardson) have just taken up residence near the maximum-
security mental asylum of the title. As the film opens, they attend a welcome party where Max is introduced to such colleagues as the oleaginous Dr. Peter Cleave (Ian McKellan), who endears himself to us immediately by purring, "I'm particularly interested in sexual pathology…and its unfortunate outcomes." With about that much warning we're off and running through this well-made but ultimately confusing psychological drama.
***image2***Stella's marriage being as exciting as cold oatmeal, she promptly takes up with a hunky, brutish patient, the sculptor Edgar Stark (Marton Csokas, playing it straight out of DH Lawrence). As Stella discovers the joys of wild coupling in the potting shed, she also discovers the nature of Edgar's particular "sexual pathology": when she asks her husband what Edgar did to be institutionalized, he replies cryptically, "Heads," and before long we know he's not talking about marble busts. Exactly how rehabilitated is the tortured artist, and has Stella progressed too far in her own sexual pathology to escape her relationship with him or grown so dissociated from reality that she must be committed to the same asylum she now fears?
Asylum
benefits enormously from its setting, a post-war Britain where all interiors are a dank, unappetizing bluish-green and human relationships are so tightly circumscribed they're easy to encode in shorthand: cigarettes and a red lipstick stand for concupiscence, the broken glass shards of a greenhouse mean marital collapse. It's also given heft by a steely performance from Richardson (
Gothic, Zelda
); her disintegration from a self-possessed woman to a quailing wreck of a human being is utterly convincing-even her face becomes dingy, taking on the dreary pallor of its surroundings. Hugh Bonneville (
Notting Hill, Iris
) simmers as the work-obsessed, vicious and utterly fed-up cuckold, while McKellen's on autopilot as the meddlesome, self-important doctor who may be on the wrong side of the asylum doors.
Asylum
is an engrossing picture which asks quite thoroughly, but never really tries to answer, the question of whether obsession can be a legitimate sort of love. In the end Stella has been manipulated by all three men, and the film wrongfoots us with an ending leaving matters even less clear.
Asylum
will probably only come into its own on DVD, when you're curled up with your sweetie and some chocolate biscuits and don't care so much about the answers to difficult questions, or anything much other than atmospheric exteriors and Natasha Richardson in a low-cut tea dress.
