Starring Julianne Moore and Stephen Dillane. Rated 18A. Opens Friday, July 18, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Savage Grace is an odd film; pretty to look at yet painful to watch.

The same can be said of Julianne Moore’s Barbara Daly Baekeland, the monster at the centre of all the ugliness, an arch caricature that mixes the mannered speech of Diana Vreeland and the histrionics of Joan Crawford, all sheathed in a parade of Chanel suits and designer beach caftans, dahling.

In this true story, which begins in the 1940s and ends tragically in the 1970s, Barbara is a social climber whose husband, Brooks (Stephen Dillane), is the heir to the Bakelite fortune. He’s insecure about not living up to his inventor grandfather’s genius; she’s a narcissist who’s prone to violent outbursts. Caught between their raging neuroses is their son, Tony (Eddie Redmayne), whose growing distance from his father feeds a dependent, creepily intimate relationship with his mother.

As they jaunt from European playground to playground and Tony starts exploring his homosexuality, Babs starts to dig in her claws. The story turns truly dark, with suicide attempts, mental illness, and some very unsexy sex. Often, it’s squirm-inducing, whether you’re watching Mommy Dearest trying to force Junior to read Marquis de Sade writings to party guests or laughing deliciously when she sees he’s crawled into bed with her and her gay pal Sam (Hugh Dancy).

Director Tom Kalin (Swoon) and screenwriter Howard A. Rodman, who adapted the 1985 book of the same name, cannot get the tone right. Not that it would be easy: the material is soapy, compounded by the fact that the characters inhabit a fake world. By structuring the tale in disconnected vignettes, setting them all to a melodramatically jazzy score, and then polishing up each frame like one of the tea sets in Barbara’s snooty London apartment, Kalin emphasizes that artifice over any psychological reality. You could call it “camp”, but that would make Savage Grace sound far too fun.

Read more: Savage Grace hunts true sordid true tale of heis to Bakelite riches