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The opening scene of “Stonehearst Asylum” sets up a film that, sadly, doesn’t follow. A young woman named Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale) is being paraded in front of a room of mental health experts. The doctor in charge (Brendan Gleeson) claims that she is mentally ill, however Anderson films the scene in a way that makes the men in the room menacing, teasing a film that should follow about how much energy was expended in medical circles to marginalize what was perceived as a lesser gender. Female sexuality was an illness to be cured. And yet even this opening scene is something of a misdirect. As Gleeson’s mad doctor says, quoting directly from the Poe story on which this is loosely based, “Believe nothing you hear, and only half that you see.”

The story abruptly shifts to an asylum shrouded in fog. Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess) is the Jonathan Harker of this story, the man coming to the dangerously-lit castle in the middle of the night. Echoes of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and “Shutter Island” hang heavy in the air, again promising a film with something to say and personality to spare; setting a table on to which too slight a meal is placed.

Newgate is the new doctor at the titular establishment, an asylum for the rich and socially mobile. When the rich and famous don’t want to be embarrassed by their uncle who thinks he’s a horse, they shuffle him off to Stonehearst. It is where the privileged few go when their minds break. And it is an unhappy, dark place. As Ben Kingsley’s Silas Lamb says, “Misery has a way of clarifying one’s condition.”