INCENDIARY

Directed by Sharon Maguire. Starring Michelle Williams, Ewan McGregor, Matthew Macfadyen, Sidney Johnson, Nicholas Greaves, Usman Khokhar, Sasha Behar 16 cert, Cineworld, Dublin, 100 min

ARGUABLY the most affecting new US independent movie at the recent Toronto festival was Wendy and Lucy. In that film, Michelle Williams is hypnotic as a determinedly self-sufficient loner, ably demonstrating how she well she can hold a film on her own.

Playing the pivotal character in Incendiary, Williams is again expected to carry the film, and she responds with a committed performance that transcends the deficiencies that litter the scenario.

Convincingly sporting an English accent, Williams stars a an unnamed Londoner devoted to

her young son and locked into a tense, loveless marriage with his father, who works in the city's anti-terrorist bomb disposal squad. A chance encounter in a bar leads to her having an adulterous fling with a Daily Express reporter, played by Ewan McGregor.

A few days later, they are having sex again, on a Saturday afternoon while her husband and son attend an Arsenal home game against Chelsea. They are among the hundreds who lose their lives when suicide bombers trigger explosions in the stadium, leaving the Williams character wracked with grief and guilt.

From that arresting premise, writer-director Sharon Maguire (Bridget Jones's Diary) piles on so many coincidences and highly unlikely events that Incendiary gradually disintegrates under their weight. It is overwrought, over-earnest and carries a whiff of post-9/11 exploitation.

One sequence of a shooting on a railway platform explicitly evokes the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, but the consequences are entirely implausible. Then there is the grating device whereby the distraught woman composes letters to Osama Bin Laden as an outlet for expressing her anguish.

It is to Williams's credit that she gives so much to a movie that offers so little in return, and that she emerges from it with dignity. But the contrived scenario surrounds her with stock characters who remain frustratingly undeveloped.

Playing the anti-terrorist unit leader, Matthew Macfadyen is saddled with the movie's most embarrassing line when he tells her: "I will find every piece of your heart that has been blown to smithereens, and I will put it back together again."