Code 46

In an unspecified, heavily regimented future, a government investigator (Tim Robbins) falls in love with his quarry (Samantha Morton), a trafficker in forged travel papers. Writer Frank Cottrell Boyce and director Michael Winterbottom (who last teamed up on 24 Hour Party People) craft a striking vision of a cheerless, oppressive Orwellian dystopia, bleak and sterile in the cities, and ramshackle and chaotic in the “outside” areas where (the film implies) the non-persons live. The trouble is that the background is more interesting than the foreground. Robbins and Morton make an odd-looking pair—he a rumpled, shuffling sad sack and she with her usual wan-pixie look. Their supposed passion is as joyless as the world they’re running away from, and the holes in the dull plot grow more prominent by the minute.