An occult Victorian period drama and feminist message piece set in a lunatic asylum—now that’s a movie with some baggage. Can it move forward carrying all that weight? Director Mélanie Laurent’s The Mad Women’s Ball mostly can. Overstuffed and often heavy-handed as it is, the movie is beautifully shot and styled, features some very moving scenes, and derives power from incendiary performances by Lou de Laâge, director Laurent, and the fabulously named Lomane de Dietrich.

Eugénie Cléry (de Laâge, beautifully alive) is the restless young daughter of an aristocratic Parisian family. She not only irritates her proper mother and father by reading forbidden books and talking out of turn in social gatherings, she also frightens them with convulsions that accompany her visions of the spirit world. Considering Eugénie a liability, her parents condemn her to Paris’s notorious Salpêtrière asylum in a cold-blooded act of deceit. Eugénie doesn’t see the betrayal coming, and though the movie drops a few hints, neither do we. The young woman’s arrival there is a truly cruel assault of disbelief and mounting panic. 

Once in the hospital, Eugénie recoils in shock from what she sees. Arrogant, inept doctors manhandle the patients in demonstrations of patriarchal authority, enlisting women to serve as orderlies and handmaidens. Scene after scene unfolds in brutality and coercion. Laurent makes the fair point that many of the women confined in mental hospitals may not actually have mental illnesses but serve instead as scapegoats for society’s unease with female rebellion, but the bullying of the patients begins to feel gloating and excessive. Movies like Quills and Affinity also indulged in gratuitous scenes of asylum sadism—perhaps it is a hazard of any film set in a harsh environment like Salpêtrière. 

Between the shrieks and banging of doors, Eugénie tentatively reaches out to those around her and unexpectedly finds some solace. Louise (de Dietrich), engaged in furtive canoodling with a doctor, confides doomed dreams of marrying him—de Dietrich’s performance puts Louise somewhere in the stretch between sweet naïveté and madness. An inmate touches hearts with a plaintive a cappella song in a chapel that brings down the inmates like Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent. And Geneviève, a sour-faced Miss Ratched type played by Laurent, has a lonely yearning of her own that Eugénie can help assuage, perhaps with her spiritual powers.

The plot accelerates and becomes more complicated as Eugénie’s gift affects the lives and perceptions of others in one of the film’s harshest scenes, and also one of its tenderest. Laurent achieves great acting distinction when her character’s cold reserve drains away and she lets her guard down to heed what may be a liberating voice from the grave (or simply kind, decent advice for the life ahead). 

The final big set piece, a ball where socialites gawk at the inmates, climaxes in violence and triumph. Some of Salpêtrière’s heroines get away clean, and some stay stuck. Although The Mad Women’s Ball verges on melodrama, perhaps it’s a testament to the movie’s power that memories of the abandoned linger uneasily after the final credits.