In Secret

It's most remarkable as a pairing of two inspired actresses with four decades separating them: 25-year-old Elizabeth Olsen, the bewitching star of Martha Marcy May Marlene, and 64-year-old Jessica Lange.

For those who want sweeping, "In Secret" offers all the essentials - unbridled passion, deceit, fate so unkind, a classically creepy mother and grand tragedy.

Despite its able cast and handsome period costumes, In Secret is, in fact, quite awful.

An effective period piece thriller that incorporates love, lust, desperation, and madness into a stew thickened by a gothic atmosphere.

Olsen and Isaac never really create the kind of amour fou that a story like this depends on, let alone the self-loathing guilt that their crime is supposed to engender.

Isaac is better in his early scenes as a seducer, Olsen is better in her bitter, angry later scenes, but they synch up by the film's over-the-top last moments.

While the elements aren't often as neatly assembled as they should be, I give In Secret credit, for it's surprisingly fun, as imperfect as it is.

Olsen is one of Hollywood's best young actresses. There is nothing she can't do. In the long run, it's the men who'll wish they'd done more to support her suffocating sense of loneliness here.

The film's most striking performance comes from Jessica Lange, evoking both distaste and sympathy as the heroine's overbearing mother-in-law.

No knocks to Emile Zola -- who wrote the 1867 French novel which serves as In Secret's source material -- but the story is stretched excruciatingly thin in this adaptation.

Lange at least has an angle on her character; the rest of the cast simply hit their marks and spout dialogue like robots, delivering lines which should evoke erotic fervour, but are exchanged without urgency, conviction or belief.

Notable largely for the anguished, nuanced performance of Jessica Lange ...