Starring Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, and Samantha Morton. Rating unavailable.

After many successful efforts to keep Ingmar Bergman’s ink fresh on the page, veteran director Liv Ullmann must have seemed like a good choice to give Swedish playwright August Strindberg an update. Remarkably, she gets just about everything wrong in this three-handed—and very sweaty-palmed—take on stage favourite Miss Julie.

Certainly, there’s no doubting the appeal to modern Hollywooders of proving themselves on the boards. And Jessica Chastain looks magnificent as the red-tressed mistress of a rambling country manor.

The original, written in 1888, was set outside of Stockholm, but is here moved to Ireland, for no discernible reason other than to let Colin Farrell and Samantha Morton use their best Irish brogues as upwardly mobile John and dowdy Kathleen, Julie’s top servants in the kind of upstairs-downstairs triangle that Harold Pinter tossed off before breakfast.

In Strindberg’s time, his mix of naturalistic dialogue with overarching themes confronting class conflict and gender roles—money and sex, in other words—was kind of a big deal. It takes clever footwork to make these steps feel new to North Americans, but Ullmann goes in the opposite direction, pushing her leads into realms that might make veterans of a Mexican telenovela squeamish.

While Morton sticks to grim realism (those bovine costumes don’t help), and Chastain works mostly in frantic close-ups, Farrell gets the worst of it, running around the big house like a neurotic Siamese cat, spitting out verbal hairballs while his eyebrows quiver apologetically. The cumulative effect has the cast unison-shouting,“We’re ACTING, dammit!” to the cheap seats. But all tickets to this disaster are far too expensive.