You don’t have to be crazy to work here…

(book on tape torrent/film torrent)

Asylum, both the book and the film, deals with the mental health and incarceration of a psychiatrist’s wife as she is punished by numerous men, all driven by
their own jealousy. The story opens as Stella and Max Raphael move onto the asylum grounds with their young son Charlie. Max’s new position as a psychiatrist
has brought them far from London, leaving Stella and Charlie to fill their days as best they can by wandering the enclosed grounds. Charlie befriends a mental patient,
Edgar Stark, and Stella soon finds herself attracted to this man, whose murderous jealousy had driven him to murder his previous wife years earlier.

Early on in the film her husband Max calls her his
favorite patient, making marriage its own kind of asylum, while conversely in the novel McGrath makes no such
heavy-handed associations. The novel’s underlying themes being more about the
difficulty in establishing objectivity and the transference and counter-transference of emotional trauma. The film becomes more about her affair
while the novel becomes a meditation on
the nature of jealousy,
both emotional and professional.

Either way, the story is a multi-layered
narrative with almost as much depth in
the film as there is in the novel. While
the film is straightforward, depicting
the affair of Stella and Edgar,
sadly. the film cannot show the extent of the artist’s
turmoil. Edgar’s attempts to capture Stella’s likeness in drawings and sculpture

become more and more deranged by
jealousy until he savagely beats her and mangles his work, a sequence of events shown forcefully but all-too-briefly in the film. As can be expected, the affair in the novel is more fleshed out, with the narrative driven by inference and subtle signs such as the length of the affair being
correspondingly etched into the sculpture as it shrinks over time. Edgar peels layer after layer of clay away as if to find her true self
hidden away.

The novel itself is certainly a deeper, richer experience but the film adds additional meetings,

subtracts others, and turns what is a creepy
gothic novel about madness, passion, and creativity
into more of a drama about forbidden love.

What moves the film is the growing
emotional fragility of Stella, shown through a marvelous performance by Natasha Richardson.
She is vulnerable, yet keeps her emotions close to her chest and her intentions secret throughout the film. Conversely, what moves the novel is the creeping
recognition that the narrator is biased in ways that the narrator doesn’t fully acknowledge
nor realize. The narrator (as in so many works by McGrath) is proven to be an unreliable source of information about the story he is attempting to relate, a realization that comes in stages as the reader progresses through the chapters. Peter Cleaver, the head psychiatrist played by Sir Ian McKellen in the film and the narrator of the novel, drives a wedge between his professional
rival and the patients he is secretly
in love with for reasons he himself is not entirely cognizant of.

I found the neo-noir horror ‘Spider‘
as filmed by David Cronenberg to be much more
in line with the prose of Patrick McGrath.
This film, directed by David Mackenzie, does flesh out the
relationships implied in the novel, and while the novel
does a much better job of showing the internal
dynamic of the evolving emotional damage
that Stella Raphael experiences, the film’s powerful
cinematography flawlessly depicts a
complicated and gut-wrenching climax.