Girls get ghastly

Having cornered the market in misogyny with movies like In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbours, Neil LaBute is now giving the girls a chance to get ghastly with this screen version of his successful stage play.

A four-hander featuring two couples, it is ostensibly a tale of shifting relationships in the small college town where they are studying, with a plot hinging on a revelatory denouement which it would be unsporting to reveal.

Rachel Weisz reprises her role from the London production of the play (as, indeed, do all the cast) and also produced the film.

As Evelyn, the manipulative art student who lures the unwitting Adam (Paul Rudd) into a relationship that is more (or less) than it appears, Weisz is feisty and abstruse, sexy and howlingly pretentious. It is a tough act and it is to her credit that she almost pulls it off.

Rudd is less fortunate, however, and his entire performance remains conspicuously stagebound within the film's naturalistic setting.

As Evelyn's influence over Adam, who emerges from the chrysalis of geekdom to the butterfly of a "totally hot guy", becomes increasingly worrisome to his pals, Jenny (Gretchen Moll) and Philip (Frederick Weller), friendship fractures and jealously sets in.

While LaBute raises several interesting issues about identity and perception, with a side order of satire on artists like Tracey Emin and Cindy Sherman, he has done little to reimagine his play in movie terms. If any script cried out to be handed over to another director, this is it. His locations, even when they are outside, remain static "sets"; the dialogue and body language of his four actors retain the conventions of theatre.

Unlike David Lynch, who persuades his actors to adopt a deadpan surrealism that intrigues and unsettles the audience, LaBute encourages a kind of super artifice which achieves neither and leaves us dangerously indifferent.

"It's never anything until it's something," says Evelyn in a linguistic splinter typical of LaBute. Sadly, the film never quite makes the transition from "anything" to "something".

The Shape Of Things
Cert: cert15