It's pretty slow, ponderous, portentous, and moody. It's also confusing, partly because the cuts back and forth between the current and past stories take place at awkward times and partly because the editing of the modern climax leaves me in doubt about exactly what the heck HAPPENED and in fact, even who SURVIVED.

I've always kind of enjoyed Katheryn Bigelow's work. It's commercial, but man does she have an eye for the camera. In "Blue Steel" the lens lingers lovingly over a pistol's contours as if the two objects wanted to get it on.

But here, well, I can't help wondering if she overdosed on a full sleepless weekend of Ingmar Bergman.

The historic part first. I liked it. It reminded me a little of "Babette's Feast." The life is one of hard work and infrequent bare wooden pleasures. Bigelow does a splendid job of visualizing this nearly joyless existence and the acting is unimpeachable on the part of everyone concerned, especially Sarah Polley who is given a pinched wind-reddened face and a delivery that never deviates from the tone of a casual remark. She is what is known as repressed. It's like watching a boil grow as her emotions simmer. As in a Bergman film there's a lot of sex around here. Not just ordinary marital bliss, which never seems much fun, but homosexual and incestuous too. The final confrontation between the three women has Polley sitting in a bed with her sister-in-law and being accused of corrupting her. I can't get over the way Bigelow and Polley handle this important scene. Polley, previously the epitome of emotional restraint, glares at her accuser from under her tousled blonde hair, her blue eyes now big and blazing with anger, lighted from above so that they seem to glow from within the shadow of her brows. Finally Polley's character seems fully alive although mad. The story is a success in almost every respect, and much of it is due to Polley's extraordinary performance.

Then there is the modern story of four amateur sailors come to investigate this century-old murder case. There's a lot of sex in this part too. Well -- let's face facts. With Elizabeth Hurley in a major role, you get sex whether you want it or not. What a succulent morsel! Not that I mean to knock her and her beckoning lisp. She's never delivered a better dramatic performance. Catherine McCormack has a better, more complex role, and she delivers too. She doesn't exude sexuality the way Hurley does but her beauty is more subtle and more enduring, the kind of woman you must get to know to appreciate.

Sean Penn is unconvincing as a lapsed poet. The other guy seems a nice enough fellow but I'm not sure why he's around except maybe to introduce a fourth character on whom suspicions can be cast.

This is a plot in which people sit around ogling one another and intuiting so many things about the other characters, without actually voicing them, that it's enough to make Henry James twitch in his grave. Somehow -- I'm just guessing at this -- McCormack identifies with the repressed Polley. When Penn approaches McCormack in the deserted library stacks and tries to make love to her up against the tomes, she balks and says, "I can't do this." I suppose this is to be taken as repression rather than just a lack of desire to perform this kind of acrobatic pas de deux while standing up. (Penn may be a poet but he's no gentleman.)

There's also the evidence of identification provided by McCormack's drowning hallucinations about coming face to face with Polley's smiling corpse underwater. But that's about the only parallel I can see, if in fact it exists. It would have been easier to follow if McCormack had bopped Hurley over the head and flung the slut overboard, but that isn't what happens.

The score is as moody as the picture. Lots of cello leads in the orchestration, although not Bach, as in that Bergman movie about sin and guilt and incestuous sex among family members on an isolated island. Nobody can criticize the photography though. In these latitudes, even in midsummer, the sun is never high in the sky but the weather is usually clear and windy, or at least it was during the summer I spent in Digby. It's a truly beautiful climate and it's thrilling to see it so well captured on screen.

If you're caught in a storm offshore in a sailboat and lose your engine, can't you throw over a bow anchor and ride it out? Or, failing that, a drogue? I don't know. But then there are a lot of things about this movie that I didn't get.