The Cement Garden

REVIEW
Based on a novel by Ian McEwan ("The Comfort of Strangers"), this bizarre and twisted tale of adolescence run amok is at once fascinating and seductively repulsive. On the edge of some barren, unidentified British city stands a lone remaining house. Its four young occupants suddenly find themselves orphaned. Julie (Gainsbourg), the eldest, becomes the defacto leader of the clan. Her brother Jack (Robertson), when his head's not lost in a sci-fi fantasy novel, is usually masturbating. Tom (Birkin) is an 8-year-old cross-dresser, and Sue (Coultard), a 13-something conformist. They decide to dispose of mum's body and avoid the orphanages and thus begins a summer of complete descent into childish fantasy that's a pointed allegory -- à la "Lord of the Flies" -- about the decay of social behavior in a crumbling industrial society. The film teases the viewer with snippets of coherency only to settle back into an infuriatingly alluring moral ambiguity.