Chen's overheated Mills & Boon potboiler is so bad it’s hysterical. Fiennes is world-famous mountaineer who meets the happily engaged Graham at a set of traffic lights in London, and five minutes later is humping her on the floor of his sister’s flat. Graham must trust him, and his kinky love games, despite a series of poison pen letters telling her otherwise. It is preposterous tripe, with lashings of gratuitous nudity.

The Property:
59 Highbury New Park, London N5

Alice, a young American career woman in London, played by Heather Graham, waits to cross a street on her way to her City office, and finds for the brief, electrical moment before the lights change that she is gazing into the eyes of a stranger (Joseph Fiennes). Unnerved and excited, she later engineers another encounter in a bookshop, whereupon he bundles her into a taxi that takes off at speed to a flat in north London where, without much of a preamble, they engage in passionate lovemaking.

She ditches her dull live-in boyfriend and succumbs totally to Adam, the new man, who turns out to be an advanced mountaineer. Later Alice learns from his sister, Deborah, played by Natascha McElhone, whose flat they have used for their amorous encounters, that a year or two earlier he lost a girlfriend in a climbing accident, for which he blames himself, and ever since has been emotionally vulnerable.

They marry on the run, but she eventually becomes aware of the violent undercurrents in his nature and then uncovers evidence of a disturbing past, with the implication that he could be a murderer. In the way of so many film heroines in a perilous situation, she then seems to go out of her way to ensure that she is alone and helpless in a house with a possible psychopath. It sounds very like a variation on an ancient Agatha Christie yarn that was turned into a creepy play in the 1930s by Frank Vosper, called Love from a Stranger. For two or three generations it was a favourite with repertory companies and amateur dramatics clubs, and was filmed with Basil Rathbone and Ann Harding in 1937, and then again 10 years later with John Hodiak and Sylvia Sidney.

However, the official provenance here is a bestselling novel by Nicci French — the pen name of the critic Sean French and his wife Nicci Gerrard — and there is a strong enough plot twist to divert any suggestions of plagiarism.

The most remarkable aspect of this British thriller is that it was directed by the considerable Chinese film-maker Chen Kaige, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1993 for Farewell My Concubine. It may seem surprising that a director used to marshalling hundreds of extras across a Chinese landscape should want to make an intimate, small-scale British suspense story, but then he has always wanted to work in the West.

The area:
The exterior views of McElhone’s flat were shot in the pleasant, tree-shaded Highbury New Park, a long residential road that runs from Highbury Grove to Clissold Park.

Traffic on the road is relatively light, and traffic calming has deterred rat-runners. Many of the large Victorian houses have been subdivided into flats, much like the one created on a sound stage by the production designer Gemma Jackson. It is a popular area for City commuters — less pricey than Canonbury but within easy reach of the Victoria Line at Highbury and Islington. Canonbury (for the Silverlink Metro) and Drayton Park (which has WAGN trains through to Moorgate) are nearby. The property: A spacious, modern, four-bedroom, ground-floor flat is for sale with APS Estates (020 7873 0203) for £215,000, which seems a low price for Highbury New Park. The catch is that it was originally built for the local authority. On the parallel Highbury Grove, a large seven-bedroom end-terrace house is for sale at £775,000 with Bairstow Eves, 020 7226 9531.

The film:
Killing Me Softly opened on Friday to mixed reviews, and is showing at cinemas throughout Britain.