Woody Allen's Match Point is a light and brutal thriller, but it's encumbered by a clunky metaphor about chance and responsibility. At the start of the movie, a tennis ball balances on a net for an elongated second. We don't care which side it will fall to because we don't know the players. Then, later, a wedding band literally balances on a guardrail, about to slide off one way or the other. It's hard not to squirm at the heavy symbolism.

One of the tennis players is Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a former pro with scheming Irish eyes and a permanent frown. While coaching at a tony London country club, he meets a rich young man named Tom (Matthew Goode), who bizarrely appears to be coming on to him. The drinks and box seats at the opera are not in fact invitations to bed, but invitations into the family. In no time at all Chris is engaged to Tom's perky and annoying but equally rich sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and another sort of love triangle has developed. Chris lusts after Tom's luscious American fiancée, Nola (Scarlett Johansson), and she, presumably left cold by Tom's casual English wealth, gets the hots for Chris. Marriages are consummated, vows are broken, women are discovered to be fertile or infertile in inverse proportion to their social class, and the social order is upended.

Without brilliant actors in the love triangle, the film might have come off as crass. But Rhys-Meyers is as chilling in the same way and to nearly the same degree as Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, and Mortimer and Johansson are perfect as the feminine bodies—one clammy, one hot—that threaten his sanity. Match Point isn't really about whether the ball falls to one side of the net or the other. It's about the opposing forces of contempt and desire that are keeping it suspended there.

annie@thestranger.com