The most incredulous moment of David Mackenzie's Asylum occurs in the final end credits, dedicating the film to mental hospitals and their staffs. I can't imagine ANY mental institution embracing this soulless project that is populated by manipulative and unrelatable crazy characters that plod through improbable scenarios to an inevitable nihilistic denouement. Even One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest showed the humanity of its inmates and a smashing redemptive finale. Mackenzie's film doesn't give us anyone to empathize with, as he plops us into the repressed heroine's neurotic world without much back story. The audience needs someone to connect to, but Mackenzie offers no credible characters. Supposedly exploring "passion without boundaries," Asylum forces the audience into a distant voyeuristic box that only makes us wonder why we've sat through its 97 minute running time.

While it's painfully obvious that Stella Raphael (Natasha Richardson) remains dysfunctionally distant from her equally unresponsive husband Max (Hugh Bonneville), it's just not believable even if imagining them as symbolic stereotypes of 1950's Victorian morality. Somehow they must have had sex at least once; they have 10 year old Charlie (Gus Lewis) between them, but he serves only as a plot devise. The entire project flatly refuses to populate its narrative with realistic flesh and blood characters. Ambitious Max is a pschchiatrist devoid of people skills? Frigid Stella is ready to jump the bones of the first psychopath that looks lustfully in her direction?

The only explanation I could come up with that coupled Stella with Max is that she must have been a patient that Max neurotically became hopelessly attached to (paralleling Ian McKellen's crazy character) and eventually married—or perhaps "had" to after transgressing the doctor-patient boundary. However it happened, the unhappy couple has just re-located to a "high security" psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane where Max has just been appointed deputy superintendent. Looking like a set derived from Jane Eyre, the foreboding dark halls close in on the inhabitants, but seem quite homey for Stella's melancholy nature.

Enter darkly handsome inmate Edgar Stark (Marton Csokas), a sculptor who brutally butchered and decapitated his wife in a jealous rage. A personal favorite of senior psychiatrist Peter Cleave (McKellen), Stark is diagnosed as having a "severe personality disorder with fits of jealousy" yet is inexplicably allowed to work lightly supervised around the garden and greenhouse. Stark initially befriends the lonely Charlie, but soon he is humping the sex starved Stella daily. Again stretching credibility, the two hopelessly obsessed lovers are never overtly discovered despite the security guards in the area. At least they are not confronted while still on the grounds. But when Stark easily escapes the "high security" institution, settles into a London artist loft, and meets Stella for weekly trysts, the secret gig is up and the plot trudges on to its inevitable doomed conclusion.

What the film does best is consistently paint each frame with dark Gothic tones to place us firmly into the late 1950's England. The landscape and sets capture the mood and create much more emotional content than do the thinly drawn characters.

Lack of character development isn't due to the acting; indeed, Richardson nobly carries the movie as best she can, veering between total detachment and complete sexual obsession. She even upstages veteran McKellen, who reasonably plays a self-centered manipulative psychiatrist with repressed sexual urges of his own. At one point Richardson pretends to be charmed by the old queen, gratefully accepting his valued heirloom, only to silently slip it off her finger when blocked from her lover and then convincingly vents her rage internally.

Fault the screenwriter and director for taking potentially interesting material and doing so little with it. It seems that screenwriter Patrick Marber (Closer) and director Mackenzie (Young Adam) are merely going through the motions, cursorily covering sexual infidelity and obsession themes that they dealt with in 2004. Fleshed out with more depth and more plausible characters, Asylum could have provided much more insight into the sexual pathology that McKellen's character specializes in. Instead, its flimsy treatment only turns the dedication credit into a cheap joke.