Asylum Reviews
April 26, 2019
What could have been an interesting horror character study... is destroyed by tortuously labored dialogue and a sluggish pace.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
July 2, 2007
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.
March 26, 2007
A little like Jack the Ripper in outer space.
February 22, 2007
Despite a superb cast, artful set design and seductive cinematography, Asylum remains a lovingly lensed missed opportunity.
May 12, 2006
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
September 16, 2005
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?
Original Score: 2/5
September 16, 2005
Patrick McGrath's screenplay, based on his novel, has moments big and small, delivered in appropriate dollops of awfulness.
Original Score: B-
September 16, 2005
It's a movie you fall for or you don't, and like Stella, I am not ashamed I did.
Original Score: 3/4
September 15, 2005
There is nothing to Stella's character -- or any of these characters, for that matter -- that you can relate to.
Original Score: 2/4
September 15, 2005
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.
September 15, 2005
Based on Pat McCabe's moody novel, Asylum has an over-the-top feverishness that suits its premise.
Original Score: 3/4
September 15, 2005
Once characters' actions lose credibility, it's hard to empathize with them, no matter how well the roles are played.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
September 15, 2005
...oh, look at all the crazy people.
Original Score: C
September 10, 2005
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
September 9, 2005
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
September 4, 2005
The film wryly wonders whether the lunatics have taken over not just the asylum but the entire world as well.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
September 3, 2005
A troubling psychological drama about illicit passion leading to tragedy.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
September 3, 2005
It's a lost cause.
September 3, 2005
In Asylum, the first time Richardson and Csokas give into their longings I almost wanted to laugh, the whole scenario so insipidly silly I almost couldn't believe Mackenzie filmed it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
September 2, 2005
The film manages to turn potentially interesting characters into caricatures and potentially heady material into soap-opera melodrama.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4