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Critics Consensus: This catastrophic adaptation of Patrick McGrath's novel gets sillier and more implausible as it goes along.
Critic Consensus: This catastrophic adaptation of Patrick McGrath's novel gets sillier and more implausible as it goes along.
All Critics (89) | Top Critics (27) | Fresh (32) | Rotten (57) | DVD (3)
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?
Patrick 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.
I think she got what she deserved!
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