Ben Kingsley in Stonehearst Asylum (Millennium Entertainment)

It’s always surprising what filmmakers think they can get away with, provided they throw together some veteran actors, attractive newcomers, British accents, and an adaptation of a beloved author’s story, in this case Edgar Allan Poe’s “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether.” The Machinist director Brad Anderson has taken a hiatus from his earlier challenging, original films and has instead handed us a worse-than-usual period piece/psychological thriller.

In theory, this movie should be great. The material: Poe. The cast: Michael Caine, Ben Kingsley, Jim Sturgess, David Thewlis, and Brendan Gleeson. What could possibly go wrong?

Apparently, most everything.

The film follows Dr. Edward Newgate (Sturgess) in his attempts to learn medicine by studying under the guidance of Dr. Silas Lamb (Kingsley), the superintendent of Stonehearst. Upon arrival at the remote sanatorium, he is greeted by a gruff and suspect groundskeeper—not an overused trope at all—played by Thewlis, and he notices that the place seems a bit odd. Dr. Lamb’s “methods” enable the patients’ delusions rather than attempt to treat them, and even the staff members appear to be a bit mad themselves. That’s because they are. That’s right: the patients of a mental institution have organized, strategized, and overthrown the staff at Stonehearst, and now they’re running the show.

The only seemingly “sane” people aside from Newgate are Dr. Lamb and Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale), a hysterical patient who acts completely normal, except when you touch her and she starts panting for a reason that is never made clear. Dr. Newgate eventually discovers that the original superintendent of Stonehearst, Dr. Salt, as well as his staff, are starving and imprisoned in the asylum’s dungeon. Thus, a plan is drawn up to defeat Dr. Lamb and restore order to Stonehearst once and for all.

On a theoretical level this could have been a great film. The question of not knowing who is sane or insane is thought provoking; flashbacks allow us to see Dr. Salt’s method of running the asylum before his imprisonment, and from today’s ethical standards, they are submoral. Dr. Lamb’s techniques, on the contrary, appear to be innovative and humane, at first. This contrast could have opened up a wealth of commentary on what sanity really means.

Instead we are given one-dimensional characters who behave in ways that make suspension of disbelief impossible, from outright clichés to purely unrealistic scenarios. The patients are presented more as “eccentric” than mentally ill, to an extent that their behavior is rendered comical and severely trivialized.

Kingsley and Caine, two greats of cinema, are phoning it in the whole time, relying solely on their commanding English accents. Beckinsale, on the other hand, is perhaps trying too hard, constantly gasping like Neve Campbell in The Craft. Sturgess is charming enough, but his character’s plot twist at the end is so ludicrous and his affection for Mrs. Graves so unfounded that any charm he possesses quickly grows stale.

It’s certainly not unwatchable, but as for paying $14 in theaters to see it? You’d have to be mad.