Geoffrey Rush plays the notorious Marquis de Sade who - incarcerated in a Paris mental asylum - vents his fantasies of sex and violence into beautifully written manuscripts.

Kate Winslet plays Madeleine, a laundress in the asylum who facilitates the publishing of his pornographic novels by surreptitiously passing his work to a publisher's messenger who comes to the gates. She is a virginal girl fascinated by the Marquis but nonetheless unwilling to submit to his raging desires.

Michael Caine plays the prudish Dr Royer-Collard, a tyrannical and puritanical physician who has been sent by Napoleon himself to rid France of this 'obscenity', who he sees to be corrupting the minds of the nation.

Sade is greatly humoured by the priest Abbe Coulmier (Phoenix), who provides him with writing materials as a cathartic therapy.

The setting is 1790s France, where the guillotine is still highly regarded as a suitable source of punishment, and where torturing the insane in an attempt to cure them is the norm.

Apart from the gruesome events which happen under the roof of the asylum, a powerful subplot is taking place in the doctor's life.

The same man who condemns the marquis' use of unorthodox sexual ideas is revealed to be a pervert himself as he takes a bride of 15 from the nunnery and then proceeds to "teach her the duties of a wife".

The main theme of the movie is the eternal struggle between unbridled personal expression and society's impulse to censor.

Shooting at Pinewood Studios and using a uniformly English-accented cast, the film is given a squalid unsavoury feel in the true style of the best British sinister costume dramas.

There is nothing of the stuffy period piece about it; the surroundings and the clothes look lived in and the characters converse and relate colloquially.

This movie is one of the most colourful and lively of its genre. There's never a quiet moment and the two hours pass in what feels like half the time.

This film will keep you gripped from beginning to end.

With an edge of danger and excitement throughout, the witty script and the ingeniously portrayed characters, the subject is brought alive in a cerebral way. An exhilarating yet terrifying experience.

Natalie Stone