Stonehearst Asylum

Stonehearst Asylum (15)

USA 2014  110 mins  Dir: Brad Anderson  Starring: Jim Sturgess, Kate Beckinsale, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Kingsley, Michael Caine, Jason Flemyng, Sinead Cusack

“Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see,” intones Brendan Gleeson’s stern alienist in the opening scene of The Machinist director Brad Anderson’s adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s playful short story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. Aha! So it’s going to be one of those films, in which we can expect to have the rug pulled from underneath us on a regular basis with shock revelations and reversals? Actually, no. Anderson shows his hand fairly early on and what’s left is a tonally uncertain but never unentertaining mix of horror, comedy, romance and serious critique of Victorian attitudes towards mental illness. And let’s just say that the casting of Ben Kingsley isn’t the only thing that will remind you of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island.

In a sequence that feels like Tanya Wexler’s comedy Hysteria reworked as creepy perv drama, Gleeson parades comely young ‘hysteric’ Eliza Graves (Beckinsale) before his undergraduate students while explaining that there’s nothing wrong with her that can’t be fixed by a whiskery middle-aged gent fiddling with her privates. Cut to the gothic, mist-shrouded, eponymous “madhouse in the wilderness” (actually Bulgaria, location fans), where a young man pitches up just before Christmas 1899,  introducing himself as Edward Newgate (Sturgess) – an Oxford University graduate who’s come to conclude his education in asylum medicine. Newgate quickly realises that there’s something more than a tad unorthodox about the modernist superintendent Dr. Silas Lamb (Kingsley) and his sinister sidekick Mickey Finn (Thewlis), not least the fact that they allow the nuts to have the run of the place. (Warning for the sensitive and politically correct: the film manages to cram in an entire lexicon of authentic period non-PC terminology, from ‘mongoloid’ to ‘imbecile’.) These aren’t just common or garden loons, Lamb explains, but embarrassments to some of the finest families in Europe, who want them locked away permanently. Among them is the lovely Eliza, who’s been committed by her own beastly hubby for biting his ear off after refusing to yield to his “unusual sexual appetites”.

Down in the dungeon, Edward makes a shocking discovery: dishevelled and malnourished Michael Caine and Sinead Cusack – the real superintendent and head nurse respectively, or so they claim – behind bars with the rest of the staff. That’s right: the lunatics have taken over the asylum! For a film with no shortage of rape, murder and torture, Stonehurst Asylum delivers plenty of, ahem, crazy characters, including a bloke who thinks he’s a horse (pay attention for the payoff), the timely intervention of a cuckoo clock (geddit?), and some amusing repartee (“I’ve never seen the harm in chronic masturbation,” retorts Kingsley on being accused by an indignant Caine of allowing the asylum to fall into the hands of compulsive Onanists). The whole thing is handsomely staged, great fun and often in very poor taste, with a starry cast who rise to the occasion with some pleasingly broad performances. One can imagine Roger Corman enjoying it immensely.