Trapped in a faceless future

Michael Winterbottom's latest movie is a cool fusion of film noir and Greek tragedy set in a dystopian near-future, whose intractable corporate bureaucracy will be familiar to fans of Philip K Dick's novels and recent films such as Cypher, Gattaca and Minority Report.

In a bleached-out metropolis, a girl named Maria works in a faceless company creating travel visas known as "papelles". In this brave new world, you need to be officially registered to apply for this permission to travel. Without it, you are unable to journey beyond your designated area; you are an "outsider".

William (Tim Robbins) is a fraud investigator who arrives to look into a case of forged papelles. No longer associated with computers, viruses are now developed to enhance certain human senses and William has taken one that allows him to read the minds of his suspects. Sensing that Maria is the forger, he decides not to reveal her, and instead takes her to bed.

The elaborately plotted and

beautifully constructed screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce takes in elements of genetic engineering, dream psychology and memory manipulation, and the film uses the extravagantly futuristlooking locations and architecture of Shanghai, Dubai, Jaipur and Rotherhithe (the tunnel, of course). Boyce also formulates a tantalising lingua franca of the future comprising English, Spanish and Arabic.

At times, I yearned for a new kind of grammar for the sciencefiction landscape; his cool, clinical interiors, shining towers of modern cityscapes and long Alphaville-style car journeys through tunnels - along with the desert locations overfamiliar now from Star Wars' Tattoine - are not as innovative as once they were. But while Winterbottom creates an authentic future, he fails to maintain a sufficient grip on the human element that drives the plot.

Samantha Morton is terrific as the lowly, lonely Maria, whose greatest pleasure is derived from seeing the delight on the faces of those for whom she provides fake papelles. Robbins, at 6ft 4in, towers rather alarmingly above his co-star and is a less sympathetic presence. His buttoned-up performance never quite reveals the emotional flesh and blood of the man inside. There is an inappropriate onscreen arrogance about him that fails to tap the veins of irony and romantic regret that thread the script like silver.

Immensely assured in its visual concept and breathtaking in its depiction of an ¸ber-society with its dispossessed outsiders, the film's lack of humanity ultimately prevents it from becoming the viscerally engaging experience it so evidently set out to be.