Stonehearst Asylum

Film - 2014

4,0

74K

Stonehearst Asylum it's a movie with Kate Beckinsale, Jim Sturgess, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Kingsley Full cast. Directed by Brad Anderson. Original title Stonehearst Asylum, runtime 112 minutes. Genre Thriller.

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Review of

Emiliano Baglio

Faced with a film like Stonehearst Asylum, one naturally wonders what kind of film Bard Anderson wanted to make and what the obscure reasons were that pushed the Festival curators to include it in the "Genre World" section. We are on the eve of 1900 when Edward (Jim Sturgess) reaches the asylum of the title to begin his apprenticeship with Doctor Lamb (Ben Kingsley). Here, as if we were at the time of the revolution brought about by Franco Basaglia, he finds an institution in which the mad, instead of living in confinement and being treated with barbaric medieval methods, are free and are cared for with love and understanding. He soon meets Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale) with whom he instantly falls madly in love. Of course the atmosphere is not as idyllic as it would seem and some members of the staff such as Mickey Finn (David Thewlis) certainly do not inspire trust, but nothing would suggest the secret hidden within those walls. Based on “The System of Dr. Tar and Prof. Feather” by Edgar Allan Poe, Anderson's new film starts out as a powerful gothic tale. The setting, the attention to costumes, the photography, everything contributes to perfectly recreating the typical atmosphere of Poe's short stories. The issues at stake are many and powerful. On the one hand there is the clash between the old and the new exemplified in the imminent advent of a new century which should free humanity from the darkness of the past. On the other hand there is a continuous game of doubles, given that none of the characters in the film are really what they seem to be. It's a shame that Anderson soon abandons all the possibilities glimpsed at the beginning of the film and takes the path of costume melodrama. Let's be clear, the director is still capable of well-constructed sequences and does well especially when he plunges the knife into the description of the barbaric methods used to cure the madmen before their arrival. Read all

plot

A Harvard Medical School graduate takes a position at a mental institution and soon becomes obsessed with a female mental patient, but he has no idea of a recent and horrifying staffing change.