Separate Lies

Herald rating: * * *

A film about emotional repression that is itself too repressed to be compelling, this debut as director for the writer of Gosford Park is the kind of entertainment that might occupy a Sunday evening on the telly but feels too slight and bloodless to fill a cinema screen.

Updating a 1950s novel called A Way Through the Wood, Fellowes has created what he calls a "moral maze".

Separate Lies is really two films in one: a crime mystery and the story of a marriage in meltdown. The two main characters are most interesting in the second plotline, but whenever things get interesting, Fellowes hauls them off into the first.

Wilkinson, ever reliable, nails his character dead centre: a sleek, smug lawyer called James Manning, he commutes to his successful London practice from his Buckinghamshire home where his pretty wife, Anne (Watson), waits, a bird in a gilded cage.

The film opens with a hit-and-run in which a cyclist is sideswiped and killed.

Attention soon focuses on Bill Bule, a bumptious local aristocrat, and the fact that the accident victim was the husband of the Mannings' maid, Maggie (Bassett), who was the sole witness and has reason to bear a grudge against them, isn't the half of it.

Fellowes' intricately fashioned script fits everything together and is full of some fabulous exchanges. My favourite: Anne asks the investigating detective (Harewood), a black man, how he likes living in Buckinghamshire. "Well," he replies, deadpan, "I was born here, so ... "

But finally, this is a picture that amounts to much less than the sum of its parts. It's fascinating but not gripping, and the characters (the tragic Maggie excepted) never achieve anything like an emotional life.

CAST: Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, Rupert Everett, Linda Bassett, David Harewood
DIRECTOR: Julian Fellowes
RUNNING TIME: 87 mins
RATING: M, Offensive language, sexual references
SCREENING: Rialto, from Thursday