Margot Zeller has a smile that could crack glass. She prides herself on her honesty but uses it as a weapon, not-so-subtle pinpricks of candour that deflate the happiness of those around her. The Ebola virus would make a more welcome guest at a family wedding. Nicole Kidman's role as the eponymous anti-hero of Margot at the Wedding is the most interestingly flawed character she has taken on since the manipulative minx Suzanne Stone in To Die For. I tend to find Kidman rather bloodless as a romantic lead and perhaps a little refined for broad comedy. But put her in a black-hearted satire that accessorises her elegance with a few decorative dashes of cruelty and she's horribly fascinating.

The problem, however, with this misanthropic family drama from the writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) is that it is not just Kidman's character that is so extravagantly flawed. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Margot's sister Pauline as a whiney new-age nincompoop with almost as much passive-aggressive artillery to hand as Margot herself. Pauline's slacker fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black) is a pressure cooker of impotent rage and creative frustration. “He's so coarse. He's like the guys we rejected when we were 16,” Margot snips to her sister. Margot's son Claude (Zane Pais) is a sweet kid whose confidence is chipped away daily by his mother's flinty bitterness.

Some of the dialogue is well-crafted and the performances are generally strong (although Black hams shamelessly at times) but the characters are so loathsome that you long for a hurricane to sweep away this wedding party, if only to give us some respite from the niggling self-pity. The narrative is jaggedly dislocated; some scenes seem to exist only for Baumbach to pile further humiliation on his characters. It would be easier for everyone - particularly the audience - if the director could find something to like in his characters.

15, 93mins

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