Lacklustre psychological torment

Rating: 4/10 (28 March 2006)

I'm sure that the stage play from which this film was taken was highly effective, if your idea of a good time is seeing a bunch of characters set up for an author to have fun giving all of them a thoroughly rotten time. Does it say anything meaningful about relationships? Nope, don't think so. The cast is decent enough, if you can look past the uncomfortable fact that Julia Roberts can wipe the floor with the rest of them with one arm tied behind her back, but the translation from stage to screen is poorly handled. I'm sure the fact that no indication is given of time passing, so that you have to catch up with the time changes through the actors' dialogue, was done deliberately to be unsettling, but it just feels sloppy and disjointed, and leaves you with no involvement in what is going on. I watched this in the same evening as Flightplan, a routine thriller with no particular pretensions to being meaningful, but which still managed to say a lot more about relationships, and was a whole heap more entertaining to boot.