The latest knowing genre item from director Brad Anderson (Transsiberian, The Call) has the advantage of superior source material: riffing on Edgar Allan Poe’s The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, it dispatches idealistic doc Jim Sturgess to a remote fin-de-siècle institution where the boundaries between inmates and custodians prove porous at best. Wielding a budget ample enough to bring this murderous upstairs-downstairs tumult to ghoulish life, Anderson stocks each scene with so many eccentric homegrown performers that events soon resemble a gothic Gosford Park.
The character-centric approach affords everyone – from rival shrinks Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine to David Thewlis’s leering steward and Sophie Kennedy Clark’s naughty nurse – their moments of madness, while Anderson’s laudable resistance to the usual bangs and crashes preserves Poe’s subtler ironies and resonances: Dr Freud would surely have been rather taken by Sturgess’s dinky Derringer. You’ll watch this supremely entertaining danse macabre with the broadest of connoisseurial smiles.
