"Hysteria" (Moviemail 21/09/12)

For a film on the development of the vibrator, Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria has been suffering from an ominous lack of buzz. A grand unveiling at last year’s Toronto film festival – generally a launchpad for an awards push – was met not with the vocal screams of delight backers Sony would have liked to have heard, but with awkward shifting in seats; it finally reaches the UK this week, hoping a bright, mostly British cast can help the audience past the film’s limitations as both comedy-drama and social history.

We’re in 1880s London, being introduced to various characters representing the attitudes of their day. Hugh Dancy, summoning the boyish charm that once was Hugh Grant’s stock-in-trade, plays Mortimer Granville, the ambitious, forward-thinking young doctor appalled by his seniors’ slaphappy approach to patient care; Jonathan Pryce is Dr. Robert Dalrymple, the slightly stiff specialist in hysteria whose wing Granville falls under; Rupert Everett is Edmund St. John-Smythe, the eccentric inventor whose tinkering, combined with Granville’s new-found anatomical nous, resulted in this small yet liberating evolutionary bunny-hop.

Wexler – an American filmmaker taking her own step forwards after her indie bow Finding North – wants to nail down the stifling repression that informed these times: you feel some passion beginning to stir whenever Maggie Gyllenhaal’s suffragette is allowed to take centre stage. Yet Hysteria takes a soft and self-defeating route to get there: the film proves damagingly attached to the romantic flourishes of conventional costume drama, and – crucially – altogether discreet, often simperingly coy, about the matter (as it were) in hand.

Overly worried female sexuality might be too threatening a subject with which to confront an audience head-on, the film instead runs away, seeking refuge in lush curtains, love triangles and silly farce in a bid to obscure exactly what it should have been getting at. Clearly no-one involved wanted to put off the Downton Abbey/Pride & Prejudice crowd, but if Wexler had been allowed to pull back the drapes and loosen up a little, her film might have had more chance of hitting the spot. As it is, Hysteria is nothing to make the Earth move.

Hysteria opens in selected cinemas from today.