Asylum

Asylum

The name “Asylum” is fitting since everyone in this place is mad or, if not all of them, most. It’s an overdone Gothic melodrama with a strong first act that spirals into shameless absurdity. For you to care about the story you would have to believe in it, but you can’t, so there it is. But the film is well made, and the actors try nobly to breathe life into preposterous material. Maybe Patrick McGrath’s original novel was better, or maybe imagined images have a plausibility that becomes implausible when a movie makes them concrete.

It’s set around 1960 in one of those vast Victorian asylums that look like an architectural shriek enormous buildings of cockeyed towers and irregular wings. Max Raphael (Hugh Bonneville) has just arrived to take over as superintendent; he brings his wife Stella (Natasha Richardson) and their son Charlie (Gus Lewis). All is not well with this family nor anywhere else on the premises for that matter: The long serving Peter Cleave (Ian McKellen) resents being passed over for Max’s job and expected to serve as his second in command, which leads to acid one liners delivered by McKellan like stiletto thrusts:

Max: “May I remind you that I am your superior?”

Peter: “In what sense?”

Max and Stella seem millions of miles apart emotionally. Charlie is not exactly cherished by his parents; he does find a friend in one of the patients named Edgar (Marton Csokas), who becomes his buddy and sort of father figure, which would be heartening if Edgar hadn’t been declared insane after murdering his wife and decapitating her etc., etc.

Edgar volunteers to rebuild a gardener’s shed that Stella wants to use; soon she’s using it with Edgar. One thing about Natasha Richardson: Asked to play a keeper’s wife who has sudden, frequent and indiscriminate sex with an inmate, she doesn’t leave an un-dropped sock.

Edgar’s diagnosis is “severe personality disorder with features of morbid jealousy.” With commendable thriftiness, the movie eventually applies this diagnosis to everyone but little Charlie, who is way too trusting not just of Edgar.

There are many scenes involving British twits who are well-dressed but with subtly disquieting details about their haberdashery and styles of smoking; they sit or stand across desks from one another and exchange technical jargon that translates as “I hate you and your kind.” Meanwhile, the cinematographer Giles Nuttgens turns the asylum into a place so big, drab and ominous that we suspect maybe “Eyes Without a Face” is being shot on another part of the lot.

Followed by too many exclamation points, words like these appeared: Drowns!!!

But I don’t want to give away what happens next, so I won’t say who drowns except that it’s not every movie that reminds you of “Leave Her to Heaven.” There is a point some ways into the film where we begin to wonder about certain living arrangements: are they plausible? (Also are they wise, but wisdom is at this stage so far behind that it seems perverse to go back for some.)

The director is David Mackenzie, who also made “Young Adam,” a story about a married woman and a young and possibly dangerous man. The screenplay is by Patrick Marber, who wrote “Closer,” a movie about four-way sexual infidelity among characters who deserved each other. In “Asylum,” the characters get what’s coming to them in spades; indeed they’re mad all right although by the end we have to admit that if nothing else, given the circumstances at least the villain is acting reasonably.

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