In the book that is the career of erstwhile cinematic visionary Nic Roeg, the story of Cold Heaven will realise more than a few chapters. Behind-the-scenes shenanigans saw financing collapse while the negative was still at Boots, and Roeg had to dip deep into his own pocket to save his film at all. Unfortunately, for all his efforts the finished film limped through the occasional festival before crashing, virtually unnoticed, onto tape. Its arrival on sell-through in the UK gives the Roeg disciple the chance to closely examine a secondary but occasionally inspired work.

Cold Heaven is his last major project of any real substance. It is certainly his finest work since 1982's Eureka, itself on the receiving end of atrocious distribution. (We will discount The Witches, which while great fun, is hardly typical.) It is scripted by Allan Scott, who also worked on Don't Look Now, and taken from Irish writer Brian Moore's 1983 novel of personal discovery.

Holidaying in Mexico, Marie Davenport is about to tell her pathologist husband Alex (Mark Harmon) that she is leaving him for another man when he is killed in a bizarre boating accident. On arriving at the hospital the following day, she is horrified by their admission that the corpse has vanished. Then, terribly, she comes to realise that her waxen husband is up and walking about and suspects her of complicity in his death.

Moore's novel offers fertile ground for a film-maker like Roeg. It is littered with super-real visions, watery metaphysics and the complexities of human denial. And for the most part, Roeg seizes the opportunity like a child at Christmas: Cold Heaven has recognisable sophistry and substance. This film belongs first and foremost to its director, and that is as it should be. Maybe if someone had taken notice Roeg could have been saved the indignity of the frightful Heart of Darkness (saved only from TV movie hell by the redoubtable Tim Roth), and directing for TV's flaccid Indiana Jones saga.

Against this, though, are the majority of the performances. All hair and frown, Mrs. Roeg - Theresa Russell - seems constantly distracted. Of course, Marie herself is constantly (and not unreasonably) distracted, but Russell is far from as captivating here as she was in her husband's outstanding Bad Timing (1980). Harmon's returning hubbie needs be vacant and Harmon is sufficiently that, but together they fail to heat proceedings enough for us to really care what happens. Cold Heaven fails where Roeg's best films succeed - Sutherland and Christie in Don't Look Now, Hackman in Eureka, Russell again in the otherwise sloppy Track 29 - by not giving us anywhere to come home to. As with Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, we can admire all this beauty without the need for cumbersome emotional involvement.

The religious population of Moore's book - nuns and priests; the whole set - are less prominent here, and as a consequence the end fails to engage with anything like the force of the novel;. Indeed, as filmed it's as though Roeg had had enough and wanted out. As it stands it is both perfunctory and confused, undercutting the contrary devout atheism that runs through many of Moore's books. The priest essayed by the scary Will Patton (the cop in Michael Tolkin's brilliant The Rapture; a sell-through on that is long overdue) is sidelined, dashing through like he's on his way to another film entirely.

Still, qualifications aside, Cold Heaven is worth seeing. For all it might be Roeg Lite it is still very much the product of one of this country's foremost cinematic minds. We have to work a little harder for those moments when it takes flight, but when it does - Harmon's accident; an extraordinary visual allusion to Don't Look Now - it sends a real chill up the spine.