This latest adaptation (via Neal Bell's stage play) of Émile Zola's 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin is notable largely for the anguished, nuanced performance of Jessica Lange as tortured – and torturing – mother Madame Raquin, an impressively physical account of seething rage and maddening horror. Elizabeth Olsen is the initially repressed eponymous anti-heroine whose passions are awakened by Oscar Isaac's brooding rake, with deadly results. The story (first filmed in 1915 and reinterpreted endlessly since) is well rehearsed: illicit desires provoke a mortal sin in the shadow of which fleshy pleasures wither. Charlie Stratton, who directed Bell's play on stage in LA, paints 19th-century Paris as a torpid dung-hole in which the suffocating air of death (Matt Lucas's bewigged Olivier literally stinks of the morgue) is alleviated only by the spark of lust – a rare bright spot amid darkened evenings of dominoes and overtight corsets. There is humour, notably in Shirley Henderson's secretly addicted Suzanne, but the general tone is familiarly mordant. In terms of longevity, this is unlikely to outlive either Marcel Carné's feted 1953 adaptation, or indeed Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice, which effectively filtered Zola through James M Cain and David Mamet, providing Lange with her most notorious screen role.