Born in London in 1950, author Patrick McGrath grew up on the grounds of Broadmoor Hospital, Britain’s largest top-security mental hospital, where for many years his father was medical superintendent. Since his novel, “Asylum,” chronicles the fortunes of a nuclear family-—father, mother, son—living on the grounds of just such an institution in the 1950s, I think we can assume a fair amount of autobiographical material found its way into the book-and into the new movie made from it, which was written by Chrys Balis and Patrick Marber, directed by David Mackenzie, and stars Natasha Richardson, Ian McKellen, Marton Csokas, and Hugh Bonneville.

I doubt that the novel was intended as a faithful portrait of young Patrick and his parents, however, since the boy in the story doesn’t grow up to be a novelist or anything else. But the setting and personnel are obviously closely observed elements of his own young life.

I have gone into this in more detail than perhaps I should, because from watching “Asylum” I would have guessed that the author was a much younger man, setting his faux memoirs in an era before he was born and stuffing it full of all sorts of recherché period detail, cobbling the story together from bits of D. H. Lawrence and Somerset Maugham and the like.
That is to say, I felt the story had literary-or sub literary-origins and was not drawn from life. I was trying to account for my complete lack of involvement in the drama, for all that the movie is stunningly photographed and brilliantly acted. Also, there is nobody in it that I would want to spend any time with, at all, let alone concern myself with their fate.

Stella (Natasha Richardson) is the wife Max (Hugh Bonneville), the deputy director of an asylum for the criminally insane, and the mother of young Charlie (Augustus Jeremiah Lewis). Stella has trouble taking an interest in her husband’s work, or much of anything else. Then, she begins an intense, obsessive sexual liaison with one of the inmates, Edgar Stark (Marton Csokas), a sexy bad artist who is locked up because he killed his wife, mutilated her, and cut off her head. As you might expect, the affair ends very badly indeed. The aloof and sinister chief psychiatrist, Dr. Cleave (Ian McKellen) plays an ambiguous role in all of this, since he could have prevented the affair from ever starting, and seems to take a voyeuristic interest in its progress.

Rated R, “Asylum” is depressing and frustrating without making much of a point. I can’t say I recommend it.

COURTESY PHOTO

Caption: Natasha Richardson and Marton Csokas are extremely bad for each other in “Asylum.”