Director: Brad Anderson
Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Jim Sturgess, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Kingsley, Michael Caine, Jason Flemyng, Sophie Kennedy Clark
Running Time: 112 minutes
Rating: 15
Release Date: Available on DVD and Blu-ray now
There’s a running joke within the mental health sector, being a staff member myself, that the boundaries between staff and those being supported are porous at best. The ‘mentally disturbed’ have seldom taken over the asylum so literally in fictional narrative, Joseph Gangemi’s script for STONEHEARST ASYLUM based upon Edgar Allan Poe’s frequently recycled 1844 novel. Most notably, Juan Lopez Moctezuma’s 1973 cult film THE MANSION OF MADNESS and Jan Svankmajer’s 2005 release of LUNACY are both critically acclaimed; Gangemi, on the other hand, is undecided on his adaptation. Is it suspense? Romance? Gothic? Absurdism, or something altogether different? All are attempted in a half-hearted fashion, and all attempts fall short of the bold and cryptic nature of its predecessors.
The film’s prologue introduces an Oxford University medical school lecture, during which a Victorian-era surgeon instructor (Brendan Gleeson, seen only twice, briefly) parades a clearly distraught woman before his students, said to be suffering from ‘female hysteria’. Following this, we’re introduced to Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess), one of the spectating students, who seeks clinical experience at Stonehearst Asylum on a suitably misty Christmas Eve in 1899. He gains residency as an assistant through pleading to superintendent Dr. Silas Lamb (Ben Kingsley), whose notions of treatment are instantly branded as unorthodox. In some cases, he seems to scarcely treat patients at all, inviting them to indulge in their delusions.
Kingsley’s Dr Lamb: “Why make a miserable man out of a perfectly happy horse?”
Newgate soon realises that the Asylum’s true inmates had performed a coup, imprisoning their erstwhile keepers (including Michael Caine, the real superintendent). Lamb, said to have orchestrated a poison-based scheme, was formerly in the military and convicted of war atrocities, causing hideous flashbacks and a desperate need to ‘help’ people to clear his tainted conscience. The imprisoned are weak, and urge Newgate to escape; by this point, however, he is infatuated with Lady Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale), the hysteria-ridden noblewoman we glimpsed earlier on in the lecture hall.
Instead, his plan is to persuade Lamb back to reason, execute a romantic escape with an uncertain and overly anxious Eliza, while fending off the suspicions of the faux superintendent’s surly enforcer, the suitably-named Mickey Finn (David Thewlis).
To put it bluntly, this performance will not be a highlight on anyone’s resume. The cast swells with actors who know how to steal a scene, portrayed excellently by Beckinsale’s initial performance as a drugged-up maniac. This produces flashbacks of Keira Knightley in David Cronenberg’s A DANGEROUS METHOD, a truly remarkable and memorable performance. From there, it goes nowhere.
Michael Caine (the repressed doctor tormenting the Marquis de Sade in ‘Quills’, 2000) is sorely underused, and characters who may have had memorable features, in the form of Sophie Kennedy Clark, Ben Kingsley (chief psychiatrist on Shutter Island, 2010) and David Thewlis (he’s been a werewolf for goodness’ sake!), all seem quite stifled in their direction.
I’d compare it to AMERICAN HUSTLE with this in mind: it’s painfully disappointing to see such a phenomenal cast who fail to cohere. Seeing legends like Kingsley, Michael Caine and David Thewlis in a Poe adaptation should have been a genre highlight of the year, and could easily have pushed Anderson to become a household name. Unfortunately, time will quickly forget this film ever existed.
Brad Anderson is one of America’s most underrated filmmakers, bringing his precise directorial eye to ambiguous, atmosphere-heavy thrillers like THE MACHINIST, SESSION 9 (shot on location at the disused Danvers State Lunatic Hospital, Boston) and TRANSSIBERIAN. When he’s working with the right material, Anderson is a craftsman, a genius, never wasting a shot or passing on a moment that should be considered deeper. The thing is, it must be tough when you’re working with a grand hall that looks less spooky than the entrance hall to a Holiday Inn, set in Bulgarian mountain ranges (the intention was ‘rural England’, also no good), and a shallow, confused and restrictive script.
The fantastically dreadful atmospheres of SESSION 9 or THE MACHINIST should have presented a natural fit, but no such luck here.
