Customer Reviews

Asylum

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This film was recommended to me from Amazon because I'm also a fan of these types of movies. From "Basic Instinct" to "The Lover", these movies really intrigue me.This movie was directed by David Mackenize who also directed the overrated "Young Adam" which was cold and boring. "Asylum" on the other hand is a better achievement by the director. One of the factors that can add to the excitement and tension of the adulterous affair is the danger of being caught. Add to that, the fierce and idiosyncratic passion often attributed to artists. Then make the artist a raving psychopath and you have a pretty heady mix.

So finds the story of Asylum, your place into a world of sexual obsession, violence and madness. Stella (Natasha Richardson) is wearily married to Max (Hugh Bonneville), a psychiatrist working in a 1950s hospital for the criminally insane. He is overbearing to the point of being monstrous (by modern standards), joking to her about her being his 'pet patient' whilst expecting her to be a no-brainer wife who says the right things when introduced socially. In the initial build up, Mackenzie let's us see the smouldering lust in the face of inmate Edgar, who's incarcerated for murdering and decapitating his wife in a jealous rage. Just as he did with his previous movie, "Young Adam," Mackenzie excels at portraying barely sublimated animal sensuality, which soon bursts across the screen in a way that is at once base and beautiful. Helen knows how insane Edgar is, and her feelings for him, but she is gradually drawn into his web of madness, together with her son.

"Asylum" is visually appealing with it's dank, grey tones This film has it's explosions of repressed sexuality that is frightening in its force and surprising in its ending. Scenes of violence and sexuality make "Asylum" a film not for everyone. The R rating is not to be taken lightly, but it is a do not miss for anyone interested in a powerfully intense film that plumbs the depths of the human psyche. Natasha Richardson is fantastic as an ignored woman with a desire to be desired that wreaks destruction.

Stella Raphael (Natasha Richardson) is a troubled woman. Repressed and bored, she's the long-suffering wife of a mental hospital's deputy director, Max Raphael (Hugh Bonneville). It's the late 1950s, and Stella's marriage to Max is a case study in dreariness and boredom. A puritanical psychiatrist, Max treats Stella like she's an undeserving servant, an excess piece of baggage there to fulfill Max's own whims.

Max has just landed an apparently cushy job at a British asylum outside London, and he expects Stella to not only fit in with all the other psychiatrist wives, but also do her best to make sure that his tenure at the hospital is made permanent. Their young son Charlie (Gus Lewis) gives Stella much pleasure, but there's still something missing in her life; it's just not enough to spend her days planning parties for the inmates and gossiping with her colleagues.

Her redeemer comes in the form of the enigmatic loony hunk Edgar (Marton Csokas), a sexy, handsome, brooding brute of a sculptor who once decapitated his wife for seeing other men. At first, Edgar helps Stella in her household chores, and becomes a playmate to young Charlie, but before long Stella is putting fresh lipstick on, swigging back the scotch for courage, and searching Edgar out for afternoon trysts in the rundown green house with hospital guards or family only scant hidden yards away.

The physical encounters are raw and sexual, with both of them unleashing all their bottled up frustrations and desires. Soon they are falling in love, both perhaps unaware that the affair can lead nowhere. Their fanatical obsession for one another soon gets the better of them, with Stella contemplating leaving her husband and child, while Edgar manages to escape, seeking refuge in the back alleyways of London.

Director, David MacKenzie follows Edgar and Stella as they progress in their affair that is so unlikely, but so well executed that it defies disbelief. Stella is formidably determined to attach herself to Edgar even though it means the end of her marriage, her relationship with her son, and her middle-class privileged life. But her nemesis ultimately comes in the form of Peter Cleave (Ian McKellan) a callous, snooping, and cleverly manipulative hospital administrator, who's on to Stella's affair with Edgar.

Stella's grim resolve to hook up with Edgar always seems to manifest itself at the wrong time and usually with the worse results, as she consciously embarks on a path of self destruction. Edgar is bad news, and Peter Cleave warns her about his penchant for violence, but there's little Stella can do to stop her runaway desires for him. She's not an evil person, like the psychopathic Edgar, but her fate ends up being intertwined with the patient rather than Max, who later on reveals that he is not such a bad husband after all.

It is mostly the lovely Natasha Richardson who holds this movie together, as she tries in vein to be the dutiful wife, making a concerted effort to fit in, trying to extract a like-minded conformity, when all she really wants to do is cut loose and act out her inner sexual fantasies, involving sordid quickies with her new found love on the floor amongst the broken glass of the tumbling down hot house.

Based on the book by Patrick McGrath, the film is well acted - particularly by the hunky Csokas, as the brooding and virile Edgar - and it's tightly directed, but it doesn't totally capture the furtive and darkly psychological nature of its source material. Whilst the film is no doubt compelling, and some of it is down right hot, the lust is sometimes overwrought and the passion dynamics often contrived and it all ends up coming across as something resembling psychosexual Harlequin romance, It's like an entertaining and darkly ironic potboiler melodrama, with a lunatic hunk at its center. Mike Leonard January 06.

Patrick McGrath's novel 'Asylum' was more a poetic elegy about thwarted love and lust than the screenplay by Patrick Marber ('Closer') addresses. The improbability of the story, when McGrath's poetic prose is extracted, surfaces and the nuances of a dark love story are lessened. Despite this the film is a worthy, strange story with a fine cast lending lustre to it.

The time is the 1950s, and the place is a mental institution in the outskirts of London where Max Raphael (Hugh Bonneville) brings his wife Stella (Natasha Richardson) and young son Charlie (Gus Lewis) to begin his tenure as a psychologist. The asylum is dark, dank, and foreboding, a place where the wives of the doctors are expected to behave and be bored at silly conclaves and teas, all lead by the director Jack (Joss Ackland) and his stuffy wife Bridie (Wanda Ventham). The sinister Dr. Peter Cleave (Ian McKellen) observes the new couple with suspicion, as they are his 'competition' in the ascendancy of director. Peter is coldly genial and concerns himself only with his 'pet patient' Edgar (Marton Csokas), a handsome but dark sculptor who is institutionalized for brutally murdering and dismembering his wife and for whom Peter appears to have a sexual attraction.

In no time Stella is bored, not even able to assist her maid Mrs. Rose (Sara Thurston) in household chores. Stella sees Edgar and an attraction is mutually palpable, and soon enough they begin acting out their frustrated prolonged lust in the greenhouse Edgar is renovating. Peter and the other staff expect the affair, but when circumstances surface Max's ready embarrassment at his wife's behavior explodes. Edgar escapes the asylum to live with his old friend Nick (Sean Harris) and before long Stella discovers his whereabouts in London and begins assignations there under the guise of shopping trips. Ultimately she responds to Edgar's demands to leave her family and live with him, all the while watching Edgar plunge into the same mental state that preceded the murder of his wife. Peter relentlessly seeks out the couple, finds them and returns Stella to her husband who has been fired from his job because of her dalliances. They move to North Wales to a meager life, Edgar follows, and before long the couple reunites with disastrous results. Stella's mind is broken and she tacitly sits and watches her son drown, and as a result she is returned to the asylum as a patient. The ending is bleak and somewhat unexpected and ties the story of love abnormally focused to a circular closure.

Filmed in atmospheric dark tones by cinematographer Giles Nuttgens the story's mood remains grim. The cast is excellent with most of the honors going to Ian McKellen in one of his usual highly nuanced performances. Natasha Richardson is believable as the tortured Stella and Hugh Bonneville is aptly cold and distant. Marton Csokas finds the dark interior of Edgar and is understandably the source of attraction for both Stella and Peter. The director David Mackenzie ('Young Adam') needed to pay more attention to the editing, a problem that makes this tale of downfall choppy and disjointed. Otherwise 'Asylum' is a suspenseful, tragic story of the asylums people create for themselves. But oh, for the poetry of Patrick McGrath... Recommended. Grady Harp, January 06

A very well protrayed pseudo psychoanalysis of the dynamics of obsessive love. Asylum explores the pathos of obsession by way of a female character (Stella) that falls in love with a patient in the mental institution where her husband is positioned to become the next superintendent. The film does an excellent job of exploring the "at all cost" behavior of the obsessed. From a lifeless marriage to a life-threatening affair, Stella ends up without love, passion or security. The destruction of her life slowly unfolds, leaving the viewer guessing what will happen next and exactly how far she will take an affair that most sane people would have realized as dangerous, partially fulfilling, at best, and extremely short-term.

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.

I had bought this movie with a lot of apprehension. But it turned out to be a very nice one. The relationship between the wife and her husband on one hand and the wife and her (dangerous) lover on the other was nice nicely potrayed and acted. The sex scenes were not graphic and left a lot to imagination...that by itself had its own eroticism. Also, the sudden twist towards the end brought about by Dr. Peter's desire for Stella was quite unexpected. Was he manipulating relationships throughout the movie to get her? Take a look and guess...

In the 1960s Max Raphael (Hugh Bonneville) becomes a director at an English asylum that dates from the Victorian era and that peculiar combination of lavish grounds and dungeons that reflected the evolving sensibilities towards the mentally ill. He is accompanied by his wife, Stella (Natasha Richardson), and their young son, Charlie (Gus Lewis), with the family living on the grounds. The family is greeted by Peter Cleave (Ian McKellen), who has been at this place for a long time, quite possibly since the days of good old Queen Victoria, and he expected to be given the administrative position. Now he is relegated to being Max's chief assistant, and when Max makes a point of remind Peter, "I am your superior," Peter responds by asking "In what sense?" The remark is uttered with a charming smile, but there is such an underlying threat behind it that you immediately think of the spider and the fly.

One of Peter's patients is Edgar Stark (Marton Csokas), who is assigned the task of rebuilding a gardener's shed that Stella wants to use. When Charlie, desperate for attention and some form of friendship, develops a relationship with Edgar, which has Stella concerned. When something happens to Charlie, she assumes Edgar is responsible, and when that turns out not to be the case, her feelings for Edgar turn into something else. The next thing we know, every opportunity she can find, Stella is stealing away to the shed for bouts of intense sex with Edgar. Stella never articulates her reasoning for this affair and we are left to piece together our own thoughts by looking at her relationships with her husband and son, the life she is forced to live at the asylum, and the mysterious stranger who wants her. Even when she finds out why he is in the asylum, it does not matter because her obsession is complete.

"Asylum" is not a love story, but rather a descent into Hell, and we can take comfort in knowing that Stella is beyond the pale so that we do not have to bring the grace of God into the equation. At some point it will be clear to you that Stella's character has no desire for redemption and you may well decide she does not deserve it anyway. Plus there is the question of how much Cleave is responsible for what happens. From the start of this 2005 film I was nervous about what McKellan's character was up to, and while I think he would claim more credit for events than is his due, I do not for a second believe his hands are clean. But this is really clearly Richardson's film, and I swear that she says virtually nothing in scene after scene. Every pivotal moment for her character is a look rather than a line of dialogue, because what she does from start to finish is more revealing than anything she ever says, and while we are riveted by the performance.

Two people are caught in a British insane asylum, a woman who's married to one of its doctors, and a patient who brutally murdered his wife. The two, once finding each other, are instantly attracted to each other and begin to obsess over each other, before it culminates in his escape and her following. But their attempted escape from the asylum is largely insuccessful as the strict order of the loveless world around them always tries to tie them down and their degressive control over their own emotions severs the bonds between them.

So basically we have a story about love that turns into obsession that turns, literally, into insanity, a theme I am quite intrigued with and that was explored certainly to surprising degrees here. The movie wastes no time in foreshadowing all the events that will happen, along with making quite clear in the first few moments of screentime that yes, in fact, Stella is a de facto inmate of the asylum. So while it wouldn't necessarily be subtle--in fact seeming to race ahead at moments when one expects the exposition to be more gradual--it still contains a vested interest in showing just how hard it can be sometimes to separate desire from insanity.

And maybe, to a degree, it's so blatantly three-act, and follows a sense of rigid literature that it is somewhat cliched in its structure, but for that it can still be enjoyed as a theatre, to sit back and focus more on the acting and just how the story progresses, not where it's going to progress which should be quite obvious to any viewer from the beginning.

--PolarisDiB

I have to agree with the previous reviewer, albeit with fewer exclamation marks. This was a fabulous movie. Must be what they mean by character-driven fiction. All the actors were amazing and there was such palpable chemistry between the Ian McKellan and the two leads. It was amazing. It ended just the way it had to. I definitely intend to purchase it and recommend you do the same.

A beautifully made film about a desperately lonely and obsessed wife/mother. The object of her obsession is a trustee inmate who is handy with his hands (as a carpenter, what must you have thought) and okay, an object of sexual excitement for her (I personally couldn't breath while he was on the screen).

Natasha Richardson played her moody best and came across perfectly. Ian McKellen was a doctor I'd trust.

I do have to say that (for me) Marton Csokas as the handiman was supurb and stole many of the scenes he shared with the other cast members, Could that have been even one ioda due to his lanky, nicely musceled body, bedroom eyes and his personal handiman "equipment?" Hummmmmmmmm... Perhaps a little.

The entire production was Grade A.