Lantana is a shrub common in Australia, and that is the least interesting detail about Ray Lawrence's psychological drama, a study of husbands and their lies, of chance and second chance, adapted from Andrew Bovell's play Speaking In Tongues.

A woman's body lies hidden from view by lantana. Dead. Another woman's body lies under a man, partners in a salsa dance class now first-night partners in extra-marital sex. She is Jane (Rachael Blake), blowsy but a tease. He is Detective Leon Zat and he is numb: a Sydney cop going through a mid-life crisis, avoiding his home life, wife and teenage sons.

Detective Zat (a world-weary Anthony LaPaglia) doesn't know his depressed wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) has been seeing a famous therapist, Dr Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey), desperate for passion and honesty. Dr Somers could do with the same; she and her law professor husband (Geoffrey Rush) are academic vultures, circling the wreckage of their marriage.

When Dr Somers goes missing, the strings of these disparate, desperate lives become entangled. Lawrence directs Bovell's intelligent, tightly spun web of a script with a subtlety matched by the supreme performances, as Lantana joins In The Bedroom and The Son's Room in the pick of 2002's grown-up dramas.

Updated: 09:01 Friday, September 13, 2002