PATRICK MARBER’S stage play, Closer, was one of the West End sensations of the 1990s. It was the first piece of theatre to explore what was then the brave new world of internet dating, and the sexual power of electronic lies. The play touched fashionable nerves in 30 different languages, and gifted Marber the kind of kudos and fortune that turns lottery winners green.

The idea of a Hollywood movie has been stewing for ten years. The brightest stars in the galaxy have pitched for parts. But the suspicious playwright studiously blocked every offer until he found a director with the film skills to picklock his play.

Mike Nichols steals the honour, and he does the unthinkable. He strands a stunning cast — a stripper (Natalie Portman), a writer (Jude Law), a photographer (Julia Roberts) and a doctor (Clive Owen) — in an airless bubble ’twixt fantasy and reality.

Jude falls for Natalie, Julia falls for Clive, and frankly the rest of the world doesn’t seem to exist. But that’s theatre; it doesn’t work quite so well on the big screen.

The venue is chilly London, but it’s inserted behind the antic lovers like a postcard. The cheap coincidences are less easy to forgive. The claustrophobia feels imposed, and arguments drift across the screen like stage directions for shaggy Shakespearean bears.

Sex with strangers is the magnetic north of Closer, and frankly they don’t come much prettier than this. Jude and Natalie meet on the street when the saucy American stripper is run over by a black cab. Dr Clive and Julia are inadvertently thrust together by a pornographic internet chat site. Both couples become hopelessly infatuated with the wrong partners at art galleries and the Paradise Suite of an upmarket strip joint.

The closer they get, the more poisonous they become. An obsession with discovering the sordid truth is the morbid weapon, and Owen has the most fun extracting it. The film shuttles madly between Law’s intoxicating guilt and Owen’s brutal inquisitions.

There are tears, and dishes of frozen revenge, and a unique camera angle shot from between Portman’s splayed legs that I couldn’t possibly explain in a family newspaper. You admire the fiendish way the film needles anxieties, but it’s ultimately as gripping as watching oversexed laboratory rats.

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