light gone dark
Added 9/13/2009
The story of passion lost and passion found and passion gine horribly wrong !!! Too many twisted lives and twisted hearts
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An Interesting Exploration of Traditional Gender Roles
Added 6/12/2009
Erotic, dark, Hitchcockian, and inevitably downbeat are all terms that can be used to describe Asylum. The late great Natasha Richardson gives a subtly powerful and occassionally wrenching performance in one of her last film appearances.
Richardson, who also served as executive producer, plays Stella Raphael, a desperately unhappy British housewife circa 1960. Bored with her stodgy and condescending psychiatrist husband (Hugh Bonneville), Stella embarks on an intensely erotic but ultimately destructive romance with Edgar (Marton Csokas), a patient at the asylum where her husband serves as a deputy director.
Unfortunately, Edgar is pathologically jealous, having been committed to the asylum for brutally murdering his wife. Soon Stella is living in fear of her lover.
This movie, despite its lack of overt feminism, still gives us a glimpse at how women's submission to male dominance can cause them heartache. Asylum also serves as a warts-and-all portrait of a woman who, due to the constrictions placed on traditional middle-class women, resorts to lies, manipulation, underhanded rebellion, and cold-blooded selfishness to escape the tedium of her life to absolutely disastrous results. Although the film is about twenty minutes too long (at least in my opinion), I found it entertaining and thought-provoking. I've viewed this film about six times since I bought it on Amazon and get something new out of it each time.
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Bring some dark passions home tonight
Added 8/11/2008
A rich, beautifully photographed drama, steeped in eroticism and emotional intensity. The film centers on a cold husband, his bored wife, the recovering mental patient to whom the wife forms an attachment, and the hospital administrator who manipulates the weaknesses of all those characters to his own ends. What's interesting is that, even though individual scenes take their time, emphasizing performance and introspection, the movie as a whole moves rather quickly. Every scene either advances the plot or shows something steamy. It makes me wonder if a longer cut of the film exists somewhere, a version where the film as a whole is as methodical and deliberately paced as its individual scenes. Maybe not. Maybe this 99-minute drama is just as long as it needs to be to showcase the foibles and bad decisions and jealousies that too often bring sadness and tragedy to human relationships.
The DVD features a lush visual image, sharp yet handsomely burnished in autumnal shades, and clear yet nuanced sound. There are no extra features to speak of, except for a few previews.
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Right at the top
Added 5/22/2008
I don't write long reviews so if you want a rehash of the plot please go to the regular publicity.
This is an outstanding film. It reminds me a lot of Pinter's classic The Servant, which was also about decaying relationships. Also set in 1960s Britain - it has more of a 50s feel - it explores the devastating effect of the relationship between a psychiatric doctor's wife and a mental patient. Whereas the Pinter film only really had 3 characters however, this has 6, all wonderfully drawn and beautifully acted. It is an actor's movie, if ever there was one. Most fascinating and yes, creepy is the Ian McKellen role, as the ambitious mental hospital director who himself has a secret obsession with the doctor's wife ( Natasha Richardson). If you never understood the term "control freak" before, just watch this guy. It knocks anything in "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest" into a cocked hat.
In a market awash with third rate comedy this drama has all the hallmarks of classic tragedy with no-one emerging from a terrible chain of events unscathed. In spite of this one never loses sympathy for any of the characters and indeed feels great pity for most, even McKellen. Nothing in this film is flashy. It is mostly very understated and constantly begs the question, what really does motivate human behavior? The worst that you could say of it is that it is stylish. Some may find it very profound.
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Love, obsession and jealousy
Added 11/26/2007
One of the finest movies that explores dangers of obsessive love and passion. Stella is a beautiful woman, living in depressing and a boring marriage to her psychiatist husband. She is isolated and lonely and her only preoccupation in life is her young son. But there is a desire for Stella to feel happy, elated, excited and wanted. She finds it with a mental patient at the hospital where her husband works. The sexual tension between the two is instanteous. The fact that the young man is an artist (sculptor) invokes notions of deep romantic emotional attachment she hopes to attain. Their secret love making in the glass garden house, makes their affair irresistible to her. But the young patient is morbidly jealous that makes him unable to control himself and function normally in any relationship. The hights and lows of their relationship are destructive to them and all around them. As we watch this story unfold with all of its unfortunate turns of events, one almost feels sorry for the woman that men see as a possesion to be paraded around, or stored away safely, when all she really needs is attention,love and passion. Definitely a story about the woman who loved too much.
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