A sad kind of loving

An exquisitely dank adaptation of the Patrick McGrath novel, Asylum is David Mackenzie's follow-up to the controversial Young Adam and, like the latter, features lots of alienation and brutish bohemian sex.

Stella (Natasha Richardson) is the miserable, elegant wife of Max (Hugh Bonneville), new deputy superintendent at a psychiatric hospital in the north of England.

And when she claps eyes on the handsome, artistic patient Edgar (Marton Csokas), you just know an affair is about to begin that will - sigh - tear their worlds apart.

Were My Boy Lollipop playing on the soundtrack there might be room for optimism. But no. Mark Mancina's score leaves us in no doubt about where we're headed.

You worry, too, that what's being offered via this slice of late-Fifties life is a cautionary tale for women with rebellious hearts (and libidos). But Stella is neither martyr nor monster and stays vital till the very last frame.

Richardson was born to play the part; a stick-bird of an actress, she's never looked more caged - or real. Bonneville and Ian McKellen (as Max's manipulative colleague, Dr Cleave) lend sterling support.

Asylum may not provide the most original of case studies but it sends out a powerful message: most of us are living under some kind of bell jar, and neither sex nor art offers an easy escape.

Asylum
Cert: 15