Mary Reilly.

Mary Reilly is a haunting, fascinating failure. It tells the Jekyll-Hyde yarn from the point-of-view of the doctor's Irish maid (a nonentity in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel). Already infatuated with her employer, the heroine falls for his monstrous alter ego once she discovers that the two men are one. The script, by Christopher Hampton from Valerie Martin's novel, comprises two psychological actions. First, Mary connects Hyde's sexual violence with the childhood rapes inflicted on her by her father. Rather than increasing her revulsion from Hyde, the association leads her into a masochistic fascination with the criminal (She even shields him from the police.) Second, Hyde, homicidal toward everyone else, comes to feel such compassion, even love, for Mary that he not only spares her but kills himself (and, of course, Jekyll) rather than continue to pose a threat to her.

Mary's strange love is clearly articulated by the intercutting of the maid's current experiences with her memories and fantasies, but Hampton doesn't pursue the implications of the obsession. At the movie's conclusion, we know that Mary has been through an emotional journey, but where has it taken her? That is, what is she about to become? An inveterate masochist ready for future demon lovers? A strengthened woman who has gotten masochism out of her system by suffering through it to the point of catharsis? Or is it possible that Mary will become a sadist herself, having absorbed Hyde's nature into her own? In regard to this last possibility, it's worth noting that when Jekyll expires, Mary lies down beside his corpse, but, when she rises, she sees that the doctor's features have turned into Hyde's, and so it is the monster of whom she takes her final, wistful leave.

The second action, Hyde's growing love for Mary, is an ingenious notion rather than a truly believable transformation. "Evil loves innocence," the ad for this movie tells us. Well, maybe, but the concept needs a little more justification than it gets here. Julia Roberts's acceptable performance and lovely face convey muted tenderness and fear, but why would such qualities give Hyde pause? True to the Stevenson original, this beast kicks a child in the stomach merely because the urchin wandered into his path. So why wouldn't he have the guts of the childlike Mary for garters? What we needed to see in the heroine was an angelic strength that might challenge a demon, and that's not forthcoming from either the script or Roberts.

Another problem: John Malkovich's performance is a blot on this otherwise well-acted movie. As Jekyll, he is made to look as debonair as Ronald Colman, but his speech alternates between pedantry and mush. (And he doesn't even attempt an English accent.) As Hyde, Malkovich looks readier to smoke a joint than commit homicide and has neither magnetism nor ferocity nor even a hint of Faustian hubris.

But though dramatically and psychologically frustrating, Mary Reilly is a sensual triumph. Its director, Stephen Frears, his great cinematographer, Philippe Rousselot, and their designers and technicians have created a late Victorian London (impersonated by Edinburgh) worthy of Sickert and Whistler, a world of blue air and gray fog against which the red paint on a transom window sings out like a cry of agony. Jekyll's house is assumptions cave velveted with shadows, redolent of both Victorian rectitude and timeless evil. The doctor's laboratory, rather than the usual gloomy closet of other Jekyll-Hyde movies, is a huge, ghastly factory that evokes terror with emptiness and sterility.

And the soundtrack is magnificent. Let other moviemakers produce torrents of noise, Frears and his craftsmen have created layers of silence. In the hush of Jekyll's house, you seem to hear heartbeats as clearly as footsteps, mice scurrying within the wainscot, resentments murmuring within the breasts of servants, fog brushing against the windowpanes, and the hesitant thunder of a storm that doesn't dare to break.

So compelling are all these triumphs of design and technique that the movie feels unified while you watch it; the insufficiencies emerge only later, upon reflection. But there is a delicate creepiness to Mary Reilly that survives the skepticism of daylight. A financial failure, it's already being yanked from theaters, but you may want to rent the video at Halloween.