This is a clever twist on that evergreen tale Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as seen through the eyes of his housemaid, played by a totally miscast but oddly touching Julia Roberts. As the famous split personality, John Malkovich gives a typically complex and powerful performance. Director Stephen Frears's lavish, black-bricked and gaslit production is satisfying both as a meditation on a literary classic and as an old-fashioned Victorian horror story, complete with a suggestive eel, dead babies and oceans of blood cascading down the stairs. But this was a jinxed movie, subject to much re-shooting and ridicule and virtually disowned by the studio that financed it.

A housemaid falls in love with Dr. Jekyll and his darkly mysterious counterpart, Mr. Hyde.