DORIAN GRAY (15).

Drama/Horror/Romance. Ben Barnes, Colin Firth, Ben Chaplin, Rebecca Hall, Emilia Fox, Harriet Walter.

The corruptive power of celebrity casts a long, dark shadow over Victorian London in Oliver Parker’s take on Oscar Wilde’s gothic horror, adapted for the screen by Toby Finlay.

Opening with the title character throwing his monogrammed clothes-trunk into the Thames in the dead of night, Dorian Gray stylishly evokes the social whirl and squalor of the capital. The set and costume designs are impressive, much more so than Ben Barnes, whose portrayal of the much-abused hero is more wooden than the frame of the infamous portrait.

Emotion scarcely troubles Barnes’s porcelain face, and it’s hard to understand why the womenfolk of the city would swoon at a Dorian so lacking in charisma or vitality.

The lifelessness of the main character is thrown into greater relief by Colin Firth’s eye-catching supporting performance as his corrupter, who shoos aside virtue by declaring: “Conscience is just a polite term for cowardice.”

Dorian Gray is Parker's second adaptation of Wilde, 10 years after An Ideal Husband, and the change of mood from comedy to horror doesn’t suit the British director well.

There’s a total absence of suspense and, cheekily, Finlay's script appropriates dialogue from the earlier film.

“I don’t think a woman should be given anything she can’t wear in the evening,” utters one of the characters here, paraphrasing the words of Mrs Cheveley.

Parker feels compelled to show us the picture up close as it moulders, and foolishly invokes a whirlwind of computer-generated special effects for the finale, completely at odds with the setting. Barnes’s shortcomings in the pivotal role prove fatal, even with sterling work from Firth.