Stonehearst Asylum
Memorable horror movies can usually be separated into four categories: so effing good that you’ll never sleep again, so effing deep that it’ll plague your mind, so effing entertaining that you’ll never catch your breath again and so effing bad that you’ll never ever forget it. It’s a shame when a horror movie, backed with a sizeable budget from studios, falls into neither. In fact, it should be locked up in one of those movie asylums where it can never plague anyone with its shallow dullness. This is exactly what should happen with the luckily named Stonehearst Asylum, proving alongside The Raven that Edgar Allen Poe should not be adapted lightly for the cinema.
Stonehearst Asylum is based on a story by the writer called The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether which is exactly where it should’ve stayed - as an excellent Victorian horror story. Instead, disappointedly, the epic director behind The Machinist Brad Anderson brought it to the big screen where it falls flatter than Jim Sturgess’ delivery. The film revolves around a young apprentice psychologist, Edward Newgate, in the brutish Victorian age of mental health who does his residency at the titular asylum under the tutelage of Silas Lamb. The place is a pillar of revolutionary care for previously abused mental illness cases but upon immediate arrival, Newgate discovers that not everything is as it seems….
Christ on a bike this is the most shockingly written, predictable and yawn inducing film that you’ll ever witness. It’s unintelligent as tension and drama flee from the atmosphere the minute Newgate raps upon Stonehearst’s gate like an incessant raven. The story stretches over a near two hour time slot with such painful lack of depth that your bum will never forgive you through sitting through this tripe of a movie. What could work is never fully developed which is even more infuriating. For example that underneath the tediously written and directed film there is a social comment on the defamation of people with mental illness including transgenderism.
Yet the focus is more on the, quite frankly, ridiculous twists that are so terribly placed within the film that it strips away your investment in very audible sighs.
This is even more infuriating with Kate Beckinsales’ Eliza Grieves - a woman who Newgate takes a shine too. She becomes a flat showpiece of Newgate to hook his heroics on when her background is ripe and ready to fulfil the film. See, Grieves suffers from hysteria - which for some cases of women was an actual illness instead of something entirely made up by the male population to control them. Grieves mentality comes from her horrifically abusive husband, clearly being controlled by her family around her too. In this, Grieves becomes everything wrong with the Victorian method of treatment that chose to violate her further until she was a shell of a woman horrified by a males touch. Yet all this is what you have to assume and struggle to get through. Grieves is never given the screen time to tell her story but becomes a very lovely reward for Newgates gallivanting ways through the asylum. So much so that it’s impossible to picture Beckinsale in her previously strong kick ass role as a vampire in Underworld.
The rest cast is a collection of people you know who can do better and as the likes of Ben Kingsley and Michael Cain echo their pay checks as they dully repeat predictable lines that make you throw your hands in the air with exasperation. However, it’s lead Jim Sturgess who you feel sorry for. I’ve spoken before about how Sturgess has been let down by the industry when he should’ve risen amongst the ranks of moderately attractive actors. Yet at this point, following Kidnapping Mr. Heineken and The Electric Slide, there is no one to blame bar his self and his agent as he parodies every single classical hero in such a farcical way that it’s neither interesting nor believable.
Stonehearst Asylum is awful. Let’s just leave it there. You’ll get no more clever quips from me in the same way that I cannot bring back those two hours of my life to do something productive.
Stonehearst Asylum is out this Friday