Archipelago

Think Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman; imagine them having lobotomies and going for R&R in the Scilly Islands with a upper-middle-class-Brit family which is, stereotypically, a non-communicative set of repressed and bruised psyches. Does anyone need to see writer-director Joanna Hogg's 2010 soph movie Archipelago?

Its improvised scenes self-consciously filmed in chronological order (a la Ken Roach's reality-seeking school of auteurs), the movie wends through wind-swept insular scenery and solitary souls in little gusts of conversational non-action. They are punctuated purposelessly by little-varied vistas of clouds.

A middle-aged mother (Kate Fahy) has rented an island house as a two-week holiday home for her family: a reserved angst-filled son going on voluntary service in Africa for a year (Tom Hiddleston), a shrewish daughter (UK TV actress Lydia Leonard), and her husband, who never joins them, indicating family relationship problems via phone calls. The mother employed a young housekeeper to cook their meals and a painter (Christopher Baker) to give her art lessons. The latter can eat with them; the cook can't.

Static framing of stilted group conversations emphasises the gathering's frigidity, false niceties and basic pointlessness. The three family members are such self-obsessed neurotics that one tends to understand the absent father's unwillingness to join the mournful charade.

Hogg may need a change of inspiration: her first movie feature Unrelated (2007) also portrayed a family on holiday in Tuscany and was critically acclaimed in the UK. Hiddleston and his sister Emma had supporting parts. She has no other screen credit, but Tom (a double-first in Classics at Cambridge and RADA-trained) had already leapt from Brit TV to Hollywood, as close-to-camp Loki, the jealous brother of Thor (and Marvel's forthcoming New Avengers product).

He's worth watching, but not as much as the two lead women: both Irish-born Fahy, the wife of Jonathan Pryce, and Leonard convey inner rage and despair tellingly. They'd have been even better with a real script. So might wooden Baker, a movie first-timer muttering moodily about art and self-confidence; the equally nicely-accented cook chats with Hiddleston about food and self-confidence.

The film's scorecard in Rotten Tomatoes logs 16 favourable reviews from 16 Brit critics, some of whom may be undeclared chauvinists, feminists or upper-middle-class snobs. One non-logged top US critic is rightly scathing. The film is unforgivably boring, to look at and listen to.