Shelter

Directed by Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein. Starring Julianne Moore, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Jeffrey DeMunn, Francis Conroy 16 cert, gen release, 112 min

AH, JULIANNE Moore Syndrome. You will be familiar with the condition.

Famous for appearing in a series of high-quality independent pictures, Ms Moore exhibits the most extraordinarily poor judgment over mainstream scripts. One minute she’s appearing as a lesbian social worker in a searing drama; the next she’s sharing the screen with Dana Carvey and a talking horse. I dunno; maybe it’s deliberate.

Maybe, forced to alternate big, dumb films with less well paid, small-scale gigs, she picks the biggest, dumbest film available in the hope it will gallop into obscurity, leaving her the untainted Queen of the Underground.

At any rate, this horror picture is, even by the wretched standards of Mainstream Moore, a roaring stinker of the silliest stripe. It doesn’t start too badly, mind.

Moore plays a psychiatrist or a psychologist or something who, following the death of her husband, is going through a career slump. Her dad tries to inject fresh energies by introducing her to a new, exotically troubled patient. It’s Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and he’s got at least two personalities: one is an arrogant street kid, the other a more polite, disabled hick. Rhys Meyers twitches quite convincingly and the scuffed Pittsburgh locations add an effective urban melancholy to affairs.

Sadly, Shelterspins crazily off its bearings when Doc Moore ventures upcountry to find the truth behind her patient's condition. This is the sort of film that, when confronted with a choice between the nuanced and the absurd, consistently plumps for the latter. If you've seen Mainstream Moore before, you'll know what we mean. Is the apparent supernatural anomaly the result of a prehistoric invasion by lizard people or, well, something much sillier than that? Sillier, sillier.

The longer Sheltergoes on, the more it resembles a drunken punch-up between Mystic Meg and a fourth-rate Stephen King impersonator. Get back to the underground, Queen Julie.