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The lord of the dance becomes the sex slave of his audience in this kinky drama from Australian director Ana Kokkinos. Baring his soul (and nether regions), on-screen actor Tom Long (The Dish) plays a renowned Melbourne dancer who's abducted, chained up and raped by three hooded women. Stylising the gender reversal with a liberal dash of arty theatricality, Kokkinos delivers an erotic thriller that can't decide whether to let the blood flow to its crotch or its brain.

"It's easy to seduce an audience with sex," Daniel's dance mentor Isabel (Greta Scacchi) warns him during the opening scenes. "I want you to go beyond that." It's something Kokkinos obviously sympathises with as The Book of Revelation tries to follow its own advice. No male fantasy, Daniel's ordeal is played straight as pretty boy Long - a poor man's Guy Pearce - is stripped, tortured and assaulted by his captors. It's graphic but far from realistic, the women's elaborate hoods and ponderous pronouncements ("Why me?" asks Daniel as he's stripped and abused. "Because you're beautiful," one of the sirens replies) suggesting that this is art with a capital "A".

"A LUSH, HYPNOTIC WAKING DREAM"

Dropping out of the dance world to work in a spit 'n' sawdust bar, Daniel spends the second half of the film trying to find and seduce the women who raped him. Meanwhile a veteran cop (Colin Friels) chases after him, despatched by Isabel to bring her star pupil home. It's all destined to end badly and it does - with multiple twists that surprise though rarely convince. Shot like a lush, hypnotic waking dream, it's boldly beautiful and plays some half-smart games with sex, power and gender politics. Yet, despite its admirable intellectual thrust, it never manages to make Long's supremely vulnerable hero into anything more than a convenient plot device.

The Book of Revelation is out in the UK on 28 March 2008.