Stonehearst Asylum (2014)

Stonehearst Asylum arrives from 2014 with the quiet confidence of a film that knows precisely what it is: a fog-drenched Victorian puzzle box assembled from Edgar Allan Poe's "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," a sturdy cast of British prestige faces, and enough candlelight to warrant a fire marshal. Brad Anderson directs with a craftsman's patience. Jim Sturgess plays a young doctor who takes a post at a remote institution and discovers the inmates running it. Kate Beckinsale suffers beautifully. Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine collect their paychecks with dignity. It is a handsomely mounted thriller that never quite locates the pulse it keeps promising. The critics of the day praised the atmosphere and mourned the suspense. They were correct on both counts.

The film's social consciousness amounts to period furniture. It opens with a lecture hall demonstration of female hysteria, and the wrongful confinement of Beckinsale's Eliza gestures at the cruelties Victorian medicine visited upon women. The film treats this as texture, not thesis. It wants the shiver, not the argument. The asylum population and its staff are uniformly white, and the screenplay shows no interest in race, sexuality, class, or the environment. The cruelties on display, families selling patients to sideshows, doctors experimenting on the helpless, register as gothic menace. Nobody is invited to read them as a verdict on the economic order.

Mental illness is the film's actual subject, and Dr. Lamb's refusal to drug or cage his patients carries a flicker of humane regard. The frame remains horror, though. Madness here is a spectacle with a body count, not a condition deserving dignity. The film shows instead of lecturing, which is to its credit and to its mild thematic emptiness. A pleasant, foggy diversion. It has nothing to say and says it beautifully.