A highbrow Misery that swaps the sledgehammers for mindgames, Raoul Ruiz’s stilted noir views like something Time Team excavated from a 1980s video-store. Five years after being blinded in an accident, reclusive novelist Sir Paul (Tom Conti) hires an assistant to write his biography. In Jane Ryder (Daryl Hannah) he finds the perfect candidate, but as the mysterious blonde settles into his secluded mansion, the volume rises on the tinkly score and Ryder slowly turns...
Who is she? What’s her secret? And why the random cameo from Elaine Page? Conti, an actor as sturdily reliable as a Volvo, delivers a brittle, curmudgeonly turn, but the story’s stiff and the denouement as ordinary as a piece of A4.