House of melodrama

A banal adaptation of the novel by Andre Dubus that drove Oprah Winfrey's book club wild, this is heavy on the weather and the acting.

Ben Kingsley plays an Iranian colonel now working as a labourer after fleeing his country during the rise of the ayatollahs. He buys a house on the water near the Golden Gate Bridge for a snip during an auction, but this house actually belongs to a gloomy cleaner (Jennifer Connolly) who was once an alcoholic, and now wants her home back.

She is determined to reclaim it: there is nothing she won't do to get through the door. This building represents everything in her life she has lost, but can - and must - find again.

The same can be said for Kingsley. Meanwhile the fog twirls, and the music coming through the raw grey air tells you something dreadful is going to happen.

You are made very aware that all this has Meaning - but what? While the book reads as tragedy, the film feels like melodrama, and really hasn't the guts for Connolly's natural spirit and warmth, or Kingsley's beautiful canniness.

They both feel completely throttled, done in by the film's over-calculated heaviness.

House Of Sand And Fog
Cert: cert15