AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
Byline: John Powers
You may have trouble deciding who's the craziest character in director David Mackenzie's Asylum, a Gothic tale of romantic obsession set in a hospital for the mentally disturbed. Natasha Richardson plays Stella, the beautiful but repressed wife of a selfish psychiatrist (Hugh Bonneville), who flings herself into an
affair with Edgar (the Russell Crowe-ish Marton Csokas), an ardent patient with one huge flaw: Psychotically jealous, he's been locked up for brutally murdering his wife. As Stella falls ever deeper in her lover's sexual thrall-Richardson skillfully registering each tremulous new stage of her fervent unraveling-we start to wonder if the two are somehow being manipulated by Edgar's shifty shrink, played by the effortlessly sardonic Ian McKellen. Based on the hypnotic novel by Patrick McGrath, Asylum paints the nastiest ...