A Perfect Murder, a well-made, stylish thriller starring Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Viggo Mortensen, suggests that the battle is already over and that we are passing irredeemably into the 21st century as soulless, immoral creatures motivated sheerly by greed, lust, and a need to decorate the howling void of our pathetic existence with pretty objects.

Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder.

Andrew Davis directs from a screenplay by Patrick Smith Kelly, who has done a marvelous job of updating the old Frederick Knott play Dial M for Murder, which Hitchcock brought to the screen in 1953 with Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, and Robert Cummings. Kelly’s cleverly machinated script segues significantly, and to heightened effect, from the original, and Davis knows exactly what he’s doing with the perfectly cast actors, the atmospheric Manhattan settings, and a permeating sense of contrast between overripe, luxurious appearances, and icy, inhumane realities.

Paltrow plays the much-younger wife of a gonzo broker whose sense of ownership defines him. They have great art and the most drop-dead gorgeous Central Park apartment in recent film history. She is his primary treasure: Aside from being a svelte blonde who works as a translator at the U.N. when she’s not lunching at L’Etoile, she has a $100 million trust fund and no pre-nup agreement. She is also having an affair with a downtown artist her own age. As her husband’s business schemes begin to tank, his acquisitiveness takes a deadlier turn.

To describe any more of the plot would break the cardinal rule of film reviewing. Suffice to say that Paltrow and Mortensen are well-cast, the twists are engrossing, the cinematography sensual, the art direction handsome.