These films have so much in common (all of them have a difficult romance at their center), and have been released so close together that they're practically begging to have a generalization made about them. So here goes: All these period films have at their core a nostalgia for a sense of order and social decorum, especially in the bedroom. All are fascinated with the restrictions and brittleness that governed boy/girl coupling in the 19th century. Their politics, submerged under hoop skirts, are reactionary--showing a longing for simpler times when the rules of gender and class were sharply delineated and something as minor as weeping at the ball was considered a disruptive act.

Much as I liked some of these films (especially Sense and Sensibility), I can't help but be suspicious of this trend as a whole. These movies, which yearn for the past and consistently portray women as passive, homosexuals (if shown at all) as outsiders, and white men as being the only people who can move through the world freely, share more than a few themes with the campaign rhetoric of Pat Buchanan.

Which is why Angels and Insects is refreshing. Of the group, it's by far the most subversive. It takes the refrains of helpless, victimized women, strong men, and rigid class rules and distorts them. Nothing is quite as it seems in this movie, and a sense of creeping rot pervades the calm surface of Victorian society.

The story centers around the Alabaster family, a clan of filthy-rich blondes living in a huge country house. There are two beautiful grown-up daughters, a snotty son, a father who spends his idle days studying natural history, and an enormously fat mother. Into this group steps William Adamson (Mark Rylance), a young naturalist who has just returned from a dangerous butterfly hunting trip in the Amazon. Unfortunately, he's lost all of his notes and specimens in a shipwreck and in his penniless state must rely on the generosity of the Alabasters.

And let's not forget the romance. William is immediately taken with the beautiful and mysterious Eugenia (Patsy Kensit), the eldest Alabaster daughter. Eugenia spends most of her time weeping and acting tragic. The two don't have much in common. William seems to regard her as another beautiful specimen to add to his collection, and despite the fact that he's very poor, he manages to persuade her to marry him.

It's clear from the glum music and strange costumes (weird hoop skirts in painfully bright colors), not to mention the strange behavior of the servants, that something is wrong in the Alabaster house, but what is wrong is not made explicit for quite a while. Angels is based on a contemporary novel by A.S. Byatt, and though the setting is Victorian, the plot twists turn out to be very 20th-century. I won't give it away (though the preview does), but I will say the concerns of the movie are largely erotic.

William is a naturalist, and much of the film is taken up by his study of insects. Some of the most fascinating shots are close-ups of bugs--a moth emerging from a pupae, a bucketful of beetles, a colony of ants. The crawly fecundity of the insect world stands in stark contrast to the repression of Victorian society; but then, maybe they do have something in common. The Alabaster family seems to be harboring some dark secret, like a centipede hiding under a rock.

Angels and Insects works best when it deals in innuendo and conjecture. As in director Philip Haas' last movie, The Music of Chance (which was terrific), a fascinating sense of unspoken desire floats through this movie. The family is so strange and wooden (they do not use contractions), the romance between William and Eugenia so distant and tense, that the simple psychological resolution we get is disappointing. The film's main strengths are its skewed sense of tension and literary sensibilities. When the tension is resolved by a plot twist that will be familiar to many readers of contemporary fiction, Angels and Insects runs out of steam. Without a dirty little secret lurking (which, like the transvestite in the Crying Game, hardly came as a surprise), the film seems empty.