Felicia's Journey.

Produced by Bruce Davey; written and directed by Atom Egoyan; based on the novel by William Trevor; cinematography by Paul Sarossy; production design by Jim Clay; edited by Susan Shipton; costume design by Sandy Powell; music by Mychael Danna; coproduced by Robert Lantos; executive producers, Paul Tucker and Ralph Kamp; starring Bob Hoskins, Elaine Cassidy, Arsinee Khanjian, Peter McDonald, Claire Benedict, Gerard McSorley, Brid Brennan, and Danny Turner. Color, 114 Mins. An Artisan Entertainment release.

Neither a straightforward genre film nor a simple portrait of mental aberration, Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey brilliantly subverts the conventions of the standard Hollywood thriller as well as the cliches of the by-now hackneyed serial killer subgenre. While Egoyan's adaptation of William Trevor's novel possesses superficial affinities to the work of Hitchcock and Chabrol, the Canadian director's more meditative style prevents us--as audience members--from being pawns of an autocratic auteur. The emphasis in this film is less on individual psychosis than on the web of relationships (both social and implicitly political) that engender it.

Felicia's Journey promotes a distinctively contemplative form of suspense by recounting the commingled destinies of two mismatched protagonists: Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), an astonishingly naive teenager who yearns for a reconciliation with her unfaithful boyfriend, and Joseph Ambrose Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), a deceptively mild-mannered catering manager from the Birmingham suburbs with a penchant for befriending young women. When the newly pregnant Felicia, in flight from an almost premodern Irish adolescence, travels from her sheltered home to the Midlands' antiseptic industrial landscape (virtually a character in its own right), she has a fateful and near-fatal encounter with Hilditch. And, perhaps most tellingly, both characters are, to varying degrees, suspended in time. Felicia comes from an almost ludicrously verdant Irish village (in sharp contrast to contemporary Ireland's vibrant modernity) where her father treats the Easter 1916 rebellion as an event that might have happened yesterday and her great-g randmother invokes Eamon de Valera's memory in Gaelic. Hilditch, on the other hand, lives in a stodgy, commodious house where he recreates the supposedly more innocent 1950s with mementos from his childhood and syrupy recordings of obscure crooners.

Just as Trevor's novel marked the 'Chekhovian' humanist's newfound interest in the morbid terrain best personified by Patricia Highsmith's novels, Egoyan's film flirts with genre conventions that are, in the final analysis, skillfully deflected. Unlike charismatic killers such as Robert Walker's Bruno in Strangers on a Train or diabolically clever madmen like The Silence of the Lambs' Hannibal Lecter, Hilditch is an almost laughably banal psychotic. A man with exquisite manners who reveres the memory of his mother, a comically flamboyant TV chef, he fails to conform to the standard movie profile of a homicidal maniac. Despite recourse to violence that appears antithetical to this dullard's placid demeanor (the film itself is resolutely unviolent), his delusional reveries are not much different from the convoluted fantasies of garden variety neurotics in previous Egoyan psychodramas. The perverse alchemy that leads Hilditch to murder the objects of his affection, however, is (quite wisely) never clearly in fo cus. We only know that this pudgy, incurably lonely man, depicted (in vignettes that are equally farcical and macabre) cooking elaborate dinners for himself that could easily feed a dinner party for fifteen people or more, fancies himself a father figure to young women in need. In a key scene, Hilditch derides a salesman's pitch for an automated catering system, insisting that "food must be served by caring hands." Aptly enough, Hilditch--affable culinary expert--is close to being an automaton himself. Trevor's empathetic but ultimately unsparing portrait of this pathetically frustrated nurturer occasionally resembled a case study that verged on vulgar Freudianism. Egoyan's more detached portrayal of a colorless middle-class Everyman is, paradoxically, more frightening. Hilditch's fondness for kitsch pop music, especially the ultra-derivative ditty, "You Are My Special Angel," drives home the point that sentimentality can often conceal lethal delusions.

The film's boldest departure from its source material involves video interludes chronicling both Hilditch's eclectic gallery of female victims and his mother's zany cooking program. Egoyan once remarked that many of his protagonists were stymied by their "lack of self-awareness." Unable to emerge from a debilitating narcissism, these terminally alienated characters attempt to gain access to an identity that proves elusive by immersing themselves in hyperreal, although ultimately spectral, video images. Even though the source of Hilditch's madness cannot be fully explained, his mistaken belief that this repertoire of images, ritualistically played again and again in his womb-like home, provides genuine solace unquestionably promotes his dissociation from reality. His video 'memory lane' only reinforces his mental deterioration: an eclectic assortment of young women (multiracial; innocent runaways as well as prostitutes--he is an equal opportunity killer) appear to him as an undifferentiated mass of wayward g irls who have abandoned him. Similarly, his mother Gala's vaudevillian turns as a loopier version of Julia Child (played with brio and a wink to the audience by Arsinee Khanjian) hint at a deep-seated trauma that is never completely revealed. Undoubtedly a mamma's boy, Hilditch's is, nevertheless, far from a Norman Bates clone.

Egoyan's characteristically audacious editing and use of camera movement are also key components of his 'defamiliarization' of the suspense genre. For example, as Hilditch's anxiety reaches its apogee, a few well-chosen images economically pinpoint his festering masochism--a television set displaying a campy moment from Rita Hayworth's performance as Salome is immediately juxtaposed with his memory of Strauss's "Salome," which frightened him as a child. Traveling shots of water towers (adjacent to--but not glimpsed by--Felicia and Hilditch as they travel by car to pay a visit to the murderer's imaginary wife) are much more reminiscent of sequences from Antonioni's Red Desert than the shooting style embraced by most thriller directors. These unpeopled glimpses of ordinary industrial appurtenances, both ominous and lyrical, complement the central narrative's oscillation between sinister and poetic moments.

Although Hilditch's growing delirium at times threatens to subsume Felicia's own saga, her painful transition from innocence to hard-won experience constitutes a mini-Bildungsroman. In perhaps the film's cruelest scene, Hilditch accompanies Felicia to a pub where the object of her English quest-- caddish boyfriend Johnny--strenuously ignores her. The fact that she is able to survive brutal rejection, as well as the more tangible threat to her life posed by Hilditch, imbues grisly material with cautious optimism. Like Nicole in The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia achieves a kind of secular redemption (totally unlike the hokey version of fundamentalist redemption touted by the film's Jamaican evangelist, Miss Calligary) because, against all odds, she is able to leave girlhood behind and become a free woman.

Felicia's self-liberation is far from treacly, but Egoyan is an ironist who eschews the smarminess of what currently passes for social satire in films. Avoiding the cartoonish characters who have become staples in recent facile attempts to unmask suburbia or the nuclear family, he evinces empathy for even his most repellent protagonists. In Felicia's Journey, he is greatly aided by the contributions of a gifted cast, particularly the brilliant Bob Hoskins. Known primarily for blustery, exuberant performances, he gives an astonishingly nuanced portrayal of HIlditch--even his tiniest gesture conveys this gentle monster's inner chaos.

Richard Porton is the author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination (Verso, 1999)