C-

One goes into a film like “Separate Lies” with high hopes. It boasts a script by Julian Fellowes, who wrote “Gosford Park,” and has directed it himself, and an exceptional cast of able British actors. But it doesn’t take long before the movie lets you down. It’s a domestic drama about the destructive effects of infidelity on an upper-class couple, with an almost coincidental subplot about a mysterious hit-and-run that leaves a man dead. But despite the fact that the picture is apparently meant to be emotionally sharp, and even to say something profound about the nature of relationships, guilt and reconciliation, it’s played at so high a pitch that it becomes rather ridiculous, like a spoof of the lesser English soap operas commonplace on PBS. And the acting, especially by the usually reliable Tom Wilkinson as a man whose wife leaves him for an obvious cad (or perhaps in this case we should say “rotter”), goes so over-the-top that at certain points one actually suspects that it is intended to be comical. But unhappily that seems not to have been the case. And as a serious piece “Separate Lies” certainly doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

The film begins with road accident, in which a man riding a bicycle is struck down by a speeding Range Rover. Before anything further follows from it, we’re introduced to James and Anne Manning (Wilkinson and Emily Watson), a London corporate attorney and his wife, who have a country house in the rustic district as well as a place in the city. It’s their housekeeper Maggie (Lina Bassett) whose husband was killed in the accident. Also on the scene is a hedonistic, amoral local aristocrat (and peer-in-waiting) named Bill Bule (Rupert Everett), who just happens to drive a Ranger Rover, and toward whom Anne is significantly less cool than her husband (though James is close to the man’s father Lord Rawlson, played by the venerable John Neville). Before long it’s revealed not only that James is being cuckolded, but also that Bill was not the only person involved in the hit-and-run. Shortly thereafter Anne has gone off with Bill and a police inspector (David Harewood) enters the picture as the dogged investigator of the possible case of vehicular manslaughter.

One doesn’t want to go too deeply into the intricacies of the plot, or to reveal the twisty denouement (or more properly series of denouements). But it may be noted that a secondary bit of business involving the torch James’s secretary obviously carries for him goes nowhere, and even the hardiest viewer may blanch when the hit-and-run case remains unresolved, the corpse apparently being of less concern than the amorous trio’s achieving some sense of personal peace. Perhaps these things were more convincing on the printed page–Fellowes’ script is based on a novel, “A Way Through the Woods,” by Nigel Balchin. But on screen it all comes across as slightly absurd. Partially that’s a factor of the story, which never convinces you that it could be about actual human beings, but the cast contribute to the sense of unreality. (If “Separate Lies” does nothing else, it proves decisively that under inauspicious conditions good actors can give terrible performances.) Wilkinson suffers so extravagantly from pangs of remorse and anguish over his wife’s faithlessness that he seems a modern male equivalent of Camille. By comparison Watson is simply bland, but Everett struts about like a refugee from a Noel Coward play, spouting an endless ream of nasty one-liners, and when he falls terminally ill, he still looks positively strapping in a hospital scene in which he’s supposed to be at death’s door. (If British hospital rooms actually look as spartan as the one here, moreover, it’s truly an indictment of the national health service.) And Neville, as Bill’s father, interrupts his almost preternaturally stiff turn with a sequence in which he breaks down over his son’s illness that’s embarrassingly poor. Still, Harewood manages to be even stiffer as the dedicated gumshoe.

In the hands of cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts, “Separate Lies” is visually attractive; the exteriors are quite lovely and the interiors either sleekly modern or burnished period. But what happens in front of the settings goes very awry. You’ll find it hard to keep the proverbial stiff upper lip when the overheated melodrama on screen is prompting you to laugh out loud.

C+

Presumably it was the success of his wildly extravagant psycho-thriller “Oldboy” that has led to the release in this country of Korean director Park Chan-wook’s earlier (2002) entry in his so-called “revenge series”–actually a doubled tale of vengeance involving a botched kidnapping, in which both perpetrator and victim seek bloody redress against those who have done them wrong. It’s a stylish exercise with some agreeably weird touches, but as a whole it substitutes atmosphere for coherence or credibility.

The film centers first on Ryu (Shin Ha-gyun), a deaf mute with hair dyed a garish green who’s largely cut off from the world apart from his outrageous girlfriend Yeong-mi (Bae Du-na), an anti-establishment activist with, she claims, ties to secret and powerful forces. Ryu works in a metal factory owned by Park Dong-Jin (Song Kang-ho) and is trying to save money to pay for an authorized, though expensive, kidney transplant for his beloved sister (Lim Ji-eun), though a match is hard to find. So he tries to go the black-market route, only to be hoodwinked by scammers who steal not only his money but one of his kidneys as well. And to make matters worse, he’s laid off. Yeong-mi then suggests that he kidnap his ex-boss’s young daughter and use the ransom to fund the operation (ironically, a suitable donor has now been found), and though he’s initially reluctant, the very public suicide of another dismissed employee persuades him to go ahead. The snatch apparently goes off without a hitch (although we’re not shown it), and for awhile it looks as though things might actually work out. But when his sister finds out what he’s up to, Ryu’s plan collapses in a double tragedy, including the accidental death of the kidnapped little girl. From this point Ryu remains one focus of attention–especially in terms of his desire to track down the gang that had robbed him–but now as much interest shifts to Park, a devastated father intent on dealing with those responsible for his daughter’s death. (A subplot involves a world-weary–and hardly incorruptible–cop whose child is also in need of an expensive operation.) Both men eventually take their vengeance in very brutal and gory fashion, but neither has the opportunity to enjoy his triumph for long.

All of this is handled by Park with a surrealistic touch, so that even the blander moments are given a heightened quality by the garish color scheme, striking compositions and frequently deliberate pacing (the widescreen cinematography of Kim Byung-il is essential to the often off-putting visual effect), as well as by the film’s odd tone, at once dirgelike and weirdly humorous. Some of the set-pieces are remarkable for their construction and execution, and as a whole the picture certainly builds an atmosphere of grim fatalism touched by irony. But it doesn’t really hang together. The coincidences that undergird the plot strain credulity, of course, but what ultimately sinks things is that Park italicizes them by his overripe treatment, and then tries to add a hint of profundity through occasional recourse to a radio talk-show host to whom Ryu writes about his problems (and who reads his letters on air). The director does, however, secure compelling performances from both Shin and Song, with the former capturing Ryu’s peculiar brand of stoicism quite effectively and the latter moving convincingly from comfortable complacency to simmering rage. On the other hand, Bae chews the scenery without restraint as Ryu’s girlfriend, who the final twist suggests isn’t quite as wacky as she seems.

There are sequences in “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” that are likely to stick with you, to be sure, but, as in “Oldboy,” the failure to link them into a tightly-structured whole, along with a tendency to linger over the most bizarre violent imagery at the expense of urgency, leaves it seeming more a splashy stunt than a really satisfying genre piece.