I rented this because I think Stephen Poliakoff is one of Britain's best story tellers. Clive Owen and Alan Rickman are good actors for which Rickman gets acclaim and Owen doesn't. Considering that the talent here was massive, this film is crap.
Those who enjoyed it might like to think of the rest of us as prudes. I've appreciated films which I found distressingly unpleasant (i.e. Dans ma peau/In My Skin). Yet I don't find incest distressing. It's something with which I've no personal or second-hand experience. I'm not convinced that it's inherently harmful, when consensual, so I'm not going to judge it.
The truth is that Poliakoff fell flat on his bum with this one. Some of the dialogue is worse than I'd expect from a second-rate Lifetime movie. I didn't understand (or feel as though I gained an understanding of) any of the characters or their motivations. Owen and Rickman gave good performances. Reeves was uneven, perhaps due to her having the most idiotic lines of the film, a la Harlequin. The direction and editing weren't very good either. I wonder if Mr Poliakoff was working with severe time limitations and was actually more concerned about the (now complete) development of the docklands (into something that resembles suburban American concentrations of office buildings with, arguably, no character, like Southfield and Troy here in SE Michigan) than telling a story about such uninteresting people.
Unless you're wanting to spend money to see every last inch of Clive Owen, surely available somewhere on the internet, there isn't anything here that isn't done much better elsewhere.
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