`The Cement Garden,” a film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s cryptic first novel about a family of four orphans in a strange, decaying section outside of London, is one of those stories so spare and bleak ...

There’s a story tone occasionally sought by movie makers, and even less occasionally achieved. It’s not quite horror or even fear, which, being glandular in origin, are relatively easy to produce.

At the start of “The Cement Garden,” two sullen louts pull up their lorry in front of a drab, square, stucco villa in the middle of nowhere and proceed to toss heavy, dusty bags into the basement.

Film adaptations have a way of whitewashing novelists, casting them as the authors of sentimental love stories and triumphant tales of the human spirit. The 1939 version of “Wuthering Heights,” ...