Stonehearst Asylum (PG-13)
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Caution: spoilers.

This is loosely based on a story by Edgar Allen Poe, which I haven't read. I could have put my review under "period" or "weird," but it's mainly a psychological thriller, so I went with "scary." Set in 1899, it begins with an Oxford professor demonstrating a case of "female hysteria" to his class. (Which of course means I'm gonna immediately hate the guy and his entire profession for believing in such bullshit.) Anyway, the patient is Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale), who pleads with the students to help her, and insists she's not mad. Some of them seem a bit concerned, but no one helps her.

In the next scene, a young man named Dr. Edward Newgate is wandering through a foggy forest, when he meets a man and his young daughter, from whom he gets a ride to Stonehearst Asylum. (The look of the place, both inside and out, is very nicely creepy and atmospheric, exactly as you'd expect for a movie like this.) Dr. Newgate is greeted by an uncouth fellow named Finn, who takes him to see the asylum's superintendent, Dr. Silas Lamb (Ben Kingsley). Newgate tells Lamb that he had sent a letter about his plans to take up residency at Stonehearst, to get clinical experience, though apparently Lamb hadn't received the letter. He accepts Newgate, anyway, and shows him around the asylum. Lamb does things very differently from any other psychiatric facility of that time, including letting most of the patients roam freely about the place. Newgate takes an immediate interest in one of the patients: Eliza Graves. However, the first chance she gets, she warns him to leave the place while he can. He disregards this warning, at first. But not long after that, he follows a banging sound down to the cellar, where he finds a bunch of people locked in cells. One of them claims to be Dr. Benjamin Salt (Michael Caine), the true superintendent of Stonehearst. He and all the prisoners here had once been the staff, who had recently been overthrown by the patients, including Lamb. Now they want Newgate's help in escaping. However, he's unwilling to leave without Eliza, and she refuses to go with him. Partly this is because she cares for one of the other former patients, Millie, but... that's not the only reason she doesn't want to leave.

Anyway, Newgate spends most of the film pretending he doesn't know the truth about Lamb, while secretly bringing food to the starving prisoners, and trying to figure out what to do about all this. It all takes a week (he arrived on Christmas and the climax is on New Year's Eve, at the dawn of the new century), and time is rather of the essence, because Lamb plans to do something drastic to all the prisoners when the new year arrives. But I don't want to give away too many specific details of what happens during that week, or exactly what Lamb's plan is. However, it's definitely interesting that as crazy as Lamb might be, his methods of "treating" his patients are actually a lot more humane and effective than Dr. Salt's methods were. (Which is hardly surprising, considering how horrific asylums could be in that era, and how many things were considered forms of insanity that now obviously aren't.) The film also has some really amusing elements. And there's a twist ending (which I didn't think was really surprising, but still neat). And... I'm not sure what else to say. The movie's not as good as it could have been, but it was pretty decent.