IT'S TAKEN Tom Kalin 15 years to follow-up Swoon, his acclaimed debut. After casting an eye over the merciless reviews of Savage Gracein the US media, the director could be forgiven for slinking back to his cave for another decade-and-a-half.

Why so much vitriol? This moistly decadent film, dealing with the unhappy demise of Barbara Daly Baekeland, heir to the Bakelite fortune, certainly offers the viewer unsettling sights. Watch as Barbara, granted peaches-and-cream fragility by Julianne Moore, sets about undermining her louche husband and seducing her sensitive son while Knocking back tanker-loads of gin.

The ghastliness is, however, to a purpose. Just as Swoonquantified the emotional momentum behind the Leopold and Loeb murders, Savage Gracereveals the cocktail of psychoses that led the Baekelands to catastrophe. It's the most elegantly appalling of clinical case studies.

Structured as a series of discrete vignettes set in exotic locales, the film explains how Barbara, following her estrangement from an obscenely wealthy husband, set about tinkering in corners of her son's life where no mother should decently stray. Concerned about his apparent homosexuality, she nags, interferes and then, in the most disturbingly literal fashion, offers a vigorous helping hand. Eugh!

Kalin and writer Howard Rodman are clearly in love with the trappings of decadence. Taking the story from post-war New York to 1970s London, the film makes good use of its modest budget as it blurs the action with blue smoke, soft-focus and flexible morality.

Big-lipped Eddie Redmayne is, perhaps, a little too gorgeously brittle in the role of Antony, the doomed son, but Moore, the Joan of Arc of latter-day Queer Cinema, lives to make sense of such flawed (not to say demented) matriarchs.

The effect of all this empty luxury and recreational self- destruction is, ultimately, more than a little suffocating. There is quite enough pretentious rambling from Barbara, and Antony's barbed quips quickly become tiresome.

This is, perhaps, deliberate. By the close, even the most patient viewer may understand the impulse to stab a Baekeland to death.