I'll tell you why so serious

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

There have been many films titled 'Asylum' over the years. At least one I can think of was pretty good. The 1972 film with Peter Cushing. Last night we watched one with that name from 2005 starring Natasha Richardson and Ian McKellen. It was listed as a 'Horror' film at Amazon Prime Videos and had a high rating. I would consider it more a steamy psychological drama than horror. As might be expected by the names involved it was well acted. The settings and visuals were well done too. The first one third of the film was promising. It's the story of a psychiatrist named Max that comes to work in a new position at large asylum for the mentally disturbed including the criminally insane. He brings along his seemingly bored wife Stella (played by the late Natasha Richardson) and young son. Ian McKellen plays Dr. Cleave, a long time doctor there that felt he deserved the position that Max was given. The wife (Natasha Richardson) soon falls for one of the inmates, Edgar. Edgar is a man who was found guilty in the murder and disfigurement of his former wife. Yes, what woman could resist such a tempting bad boy like Edgar, geesh. Soon Stella and Edgar begin an unlikely steamy love affair right under the nose of her husband, the guards and everyone else at the Asylum. This place has some security. They have steamy love making encounters right on the asylum grounds in places where he is doing jobs as a trusted inmate. Sometimes they just miss being caught on the grounds by a guard coming to check on him. It all becomes rather laughable the chances the wife takes. Still the first third of the film is intriguing and makes you wonder where it will all lead. Is Ian McKellen's character some how a part of all this? What part does he play in what's to come? Unfortunately the story soon turns into one where you do not care about a single character in the film with the exception of the little boy. The inmate soon easily escapes when he realizes he will not be released anytime in the near future. The wife finds shopping excursion excuses to go weekly into the city where she joins him at his hide out. Eventually Stella leaves her husband to be with Edgar, even though he is now jealous of her talking to other men and beats her regularly. The story goes even further downhill from there dragging on with more depressing and irritating developments. Finally at the depressing end we found ourselves asking ourselves why they turned such a promising drama into such a total mess. Don't bother watching this film unless you like depressing pointless movies with characters you eventually don't care about.

This movie is scary, sexy, and sorrowful. Just lovely. I was SO sad to find that this was a novel and I hadn't read it first. I will say that this movie is not for everyone. I will also say that it is a work of art. It portrays perfectly that passion, love, and obsession one may feel for someone special literally teeters on the line of insanity. Richardson was classy, closed, and one could feel her entrapment and desire to burst free. Csokas is brooding, feral, and one can tell that despite his unpredictable, dangerous nature, he is capable of -if not, requiring- love and tenderness. While entranced by him, the audience just barely takes register of the brilliantly cunning and manipulative McKellen. He was the true master puppeteer of the story, and all amongst him were tiny marionette dolls to view for entertainment, study psychologically, and eventually destroy what was, sadly, doomed to begin with. Lust is a driving theme in the movie, and that may be off-putting for some, but that is only part of the ride, and I feel that the plot is also very much about the lengths people will go to for love, or at the very least, ridding themselves of loneliness. This may well be one of my new favorites.

In the 50's, the psychiatrist Max Raphael (Hugh Bonneville) is hired to work as superintendent of an asylum in the outskirts of London, and he moves with his wife Stella Raphael (Natasha Richardson) and their son Charlie (Gus Lewis). Stella has a passionless marriage and is ignored by Max; her boredom changes when her son befriends the handsome inmate Edgar Stark (Marton Csokas), an sculptor that in a crisis of jealousy had killed and disfigured his wife, and that is treated by Dr. Peter Cleave (Ian McKellen), an ambitious psychiatrist that aspired Max's position. During the afternoons, Stella has a hot adulterous affair with Edgar until the day he escapes and their affair is discovered. Stella has to take a decision between her family and her wild passion for Edgar."Asylum" is a sort of combination of "Madame Bovary" with "La Ragazza di Trieste", telling the wild and tragic passion of an ignored and bored woman and her descent into a hell life with a madman. The narrative is sexually tense, and the still sexy Natasha Richardson has a fantastic performance in the role of a woman that becomes obsessed by her destructive desire. Her chemistry with Marton Csokas is amazing, combining tension, madness and eroticism in a stylish cinematography. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Paixão Sem Limites" ("Passion Without Limits")

This film is about the wife of a psychiatrist who falls in love with one of the patients in the psychiatric institution.At the start, I thought that the scenes seem disjointed. The scenes were so short that it seems truncated and underdeveloped. However, as the film develops, the film no longer feels this way. Instead, this turns into an advantage because the scenes are only as long as they need to be, and hence the film is tight and intense, and things happen all the time. There is hardly room for the viewers to breathe!This is an intense film with a lot of emotions. We get to see love, hate, jealousy and regret. Both the director and the actors capture the emotions in the most vivid manner that makes me feel for the characters.The ending is rather unexpected, and the reaction of all the parties concerned in the film are also portrayed.