The Monk, review - Telegraph French (ST) Dir: Dominik Moll. Starring: Vincent Cassel As the gradually corrupted Capuchin abbot in this amazingly brisk adaptation of Matthew Lewis's 1796 Gothic doorstop, Vincent Cassel gives good glower. Still, he can't out-act the weather, which is perfect: inky thunderclouds cling to the monastery turrets and won't let go. French thriller specialist Dominik Moll (Lemming) has mounted it with an outstanding cinematographer, Patrick Blossier (Red Lights), and the scoring services of the reliably terrific Alberto Iglesias. Thanks to them, the movie broods like nobody's business, setting us up for a temptingly black slab of cassocks-off ecclesiastical depravity. If only it were a thicker slab. The downside of Moll's slicing, surgical approach is that his movie resembles a trailer for Lewis's book, not a fully realised interpretation. Without the screen time to register as fully distinct personalities, the three vixens ranged before Cassel's Ambrosio become thin, temptressy ideas of the feminine, rather than women, and the pacing suffers from opaque motivation all round. Moll leaves us with mood, and lots of it: the mask worn by a facially deformed novice lends a truly creepy charge to every scene it appears in. The surface chills, but what's under merely underwhelms: like Moll's whole stab at this fable of carnal knowledge, it needed more fleshing out.