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That brings us to "Felicia's Journey," Egoyan's adaptation of William Trevor's 1994 novel, which takes the director away from the northern light and underpopulated spaces of Canada for the first time. This is a hard film to sit through -- it's a dank and claustrophobic little thriller, though it eventually builds to a powerful climax -- and a hard film to get your head around. I admired it a lot more than I liked it. Certainly "Felicia's Journey" has ambitious, even noble goals, and it's anchored by terrific performances from Bob Hoskins and young Irish actress Elaine Cassidy. Ultimately, the marriage between author and director seems misguided, and the resulting film, despite many powerful moments, is a disconcerting muddle.

Felicia's Journey Directed by Atom Egoyan Starring Bob Hoskins, Elaine Cassidy, Gerard McSorley, Claire Benedict and Arsinée Khanjian

Fundamentally, "Felicia's Journey" is a story about a vulnerable girl and a predatory, evil man that sees the human loneliness in each of them. For Trevor, an Irish writer who has lived in England for many years, this is also arguably a parable about the drama of aggression and victimization that these two countries have play-acted with each other over the centuries. It is not, however, a tale of Information Age disconnection, in the vein of early Egoyan films like "Family Viewing" and "Speaking Parts," and the director's attempts to push the film in that direction only cloud the already muddy waters. If Egoyan handles the thriller mechanics of the central narrative skillfully, he is utterly at sea in the political-psychological subtext of "Felicia's Journey," and his presentation of Britain, Ireland and relations between them seems canned and stereotypical.

At its best, Egoyan's screenplay strikes a deliberately ambiguous tone blending existential horror and black comedy, as if he were aiming somewhere between Stanley Kubrick and Dennis Potter. If Joe Hilditch (Hoskins) weren't an apparent serial killer -- don't worry, I'm really not giving anything away -- he'd be a familiar British figure of fun. Hoskins plays him as a fussy, middle-aged bachelor with pretensions toward refinement, who only listens to scratchy recordings of ancient English pop music and dines alone every night, using opera glasses to watch videotapes of his mother, a one-time celebrity chef (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan's wife, in an unfortunately camped-up performance). On the other hand, Felicia (Cassidy) is a figure not of comedy but of almost mythic tragedy -- the pregnant, abandoned country girl whose voyage to the great metropolis can only end badly.

As is typical with Egoyan, the structure is complicated and the layers of cinematic technique and texture are even more so. We travel both forward and backward in time, to the dismal County Cork village Felicia has fled and into Hilditch's unhappy childhood. We venture from the drab naturalism of the film's present tense in Birmingham into iridescent color video and black-and-white 1960s television imagery, never quite sure if we are seeing memory, fantasy or samples from Hilditch's macabre tape library. But all this technical adroitness -- I'm tempted to use that awful word "cleverness" -- can't hide the fact that "Felicia's Journey" offers few surprises.

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