Asylum (2005)
Average Rating: 5.5/10
Reviews Counted: 87
Fresh: 32 | Rotten: 55
This catastrophic adaptation of Patrick McGrath's novel gets sillier and more implausible as it goes along.
Average Rating: 5.1/10
Critic Reviews: 26
Fresh: 8 | Rotten: 18
This catastrophic adaptation of Patrick McGrath's novel gets sillier and more implausible as it goes along.
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Average Rating: 2.8/5
User Ratings: 21,089
Movie Info
A woman becomes very curious about one of her psychiatrist husband's inmates, a man who was found guilty in the murder and disfigurement of his former wife.
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Asylum Trailer & Photos
All Critics (93) | Top Critics (29) | Fresh (32) | Rotten (55) | DVD (4)
Asylum had promise. But it's bad enough to make one wonder just who had the loose screws -- the characters, or the people who filmed them?
Top CriticPatrick McGrath's screenplay, based on his novel, has moments big and small, delivered in appropriate dollops of awfulness.
It's a movie you fall for or you don't, and like Stella, I am not ashamed I did.
Once characters' actions lose credibility, it's hard to empathize with them, no matter how well the roles are played.
The film, with its uniformly terrific cast, stern Gothic overtones and steady but measured pacing, is a crisp, old-fashioned delight, eschewing cheap tricks for repeated tiny pricks of unease that work up to a continuous gnawing dread.
Asylum is all very formal, detached, and, regrettably, sane.
offers a bleak vision of the Fifties, where an outbreak of passion or an artistic impulse would be quickly subjected, like any other madness, to containment.
A little like Jack the Ripper in outer space.
Despite a superb cast, artful set design and seductive cinematography, Asylum remains a lovingly lensed missed opportunity.
There is nothing to Stella's character -- or any of these characters, for that matter -- that you can relate to.
So obsessed with rendering Patrick McGrath's exquisitely twisted Gothic novel as a refined affair that it forgets less ambitious pursuits, like sussing out a way to keep us awake.
Based on Pat McCabe's moody novel, Asylum has an over-the-top feverishness that suits its premise.
...oh, look at all the crazy people.
Marton Csokas ... comes across as a hybrid of Russell Crowe and Clive Owen in full-on brooding mode and has a genuine chemistry with Richardson that goes some way to explaining why she stays with him as a long as she does.
The film wryly wonders whether the lunatics have taken over not just the asylum but the entire world as well.
A troubling psychological drama about illicit passion leading to tragedy.
It's a lost cause.
The film manages to turn potentially interesting characters into caricatures and potentially heady material into soap-opera melodrama.
A sort of perverse update of an overwrought Barbara Stanwyck-Bette Davis melodrama...
The film's great strength is a cast of supporting players who steal scene after scene from their leading lady.
... one of those terribly restrained psychological dramas that simply drips with prestige -- but too often trips over its own pretensions.
Audience Reviews for Asylum
Super Reviewer
[font=Century Gothic][/font]
[font=Century Gothic]"Asylum" is a dark and unpredictable psychological drama about the social restrictions in place on people in this time and place. The movie is aided by excellent performances, especially by Natasha Richardson and Ian McKellen, playing an underwritten role with gusto. However, it seemed like there was something missing from the movie which could have shed light on some of the characters' motivations(for example, Stella has been married for twelve years but is reckless in her behavior) which at times seemed murky. [/font]
Super Reviewer
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Movie: ID: 3619 Title: Asylum Release Date: 2005-09-09 00:00:00.0 MPAA: 4 Status: 1
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