Asylum (2005)

What a melodramatic farrago the film version of this novel turned out to be.  I am not sure who of the normally able cast was the most embarrassing, but I think top honours must go to Sir Gandalf -- I mean Ian McKellan.  Cold fish Hugh Bonneville and his repressed wife, Natasha Richardson, take a posting to a posh mental asylum where Sir Ian hopes to succeed administrator Joss Ackland.  You can tell its a posh place since there is a annual black-tie ball for the staff and the inmates.  It is here that Richardson develops her lust for pet patient Marton Csokas (a wife-murderer) with whom she has been cavorting while he has been on work detail in her garden.  Their relationship seems to be one of sexual obsession rather than of love on both sides and when he escapes the asylum, she leaves her husband and son to join him on the lam.  (What they are living on is anyone's guess.)  After the police find their love nest, she is arrested and reluctantly rejoins the family, while her vicious lover is still on the loose.  Having lost his job (to McKellan's delight), Bonneville takes a posting in North Wales, but Csokas pursues his obsession and is finally arrested, causing Richardson to become so distracted that a tragedy follows which results in her being incarcerated in the same asylum (where of course McKellan is keeping Csokas in solitary confinement).  Even further irrational behaviour follows, but I can say no more without competely giving the game away, just in case you still might want to see it.  One thing which really annoyed me about this film is that it is obviously meant to be a period piece set in the grey Britain of the 1950s, but Richardson with her push-up bra looks as if she has wandered in off the set of another movie.