Thanksgiving, 1973. Suburban Connecticut. Watergate is all over the TV. Here we meet the Hoods and their neighbours the Carvers. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is screwing Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver). Elena Hood (Joan Allen) makes a life for herself by shoplifting. Paul Hood (Tobey Maguire) is at prep school in New York and is desperately trying to get laid, while his sexually precocious 14-year-old sister Wendy (the sensational Christina Ricci) is already getting busy with the Carvers’ two young sons, Mikey (Elijah Wood) and Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd). Things finally come to a head on the same night as both a fashionable wife-swapping party and the eponymous ice storm that will claim at least one life before morning.

If Lee’s film has a message, then it is surely that life, whatever its infinite variety, is shit. The film never suggests that any of its participants is doing these things because it will bring any measure of joy. Kline’s affair is doomed to early closure once he starts taking Weaver as much for granted as his own wife. And this is surely the most soulless part that actress has ever played. She stalks the screen with jaded sophistication, taking in extra-marital sex, key parties, and even a suggestion of S&M with equal disdain. Joan Allen, on the other hand, looks to have strayed in from the opposite direction. She is adrift in the 70s, trying desperately not to embarrass herself.

Stylistically the film echoes Weaver’s cold detachment. Lee’s camera is watching, not participating, and we are distanced from ever engaging emotionally by the extraordinary job done in designing down the picture into surely one of the least attractive ever made. Even the 70s themselves never looked as drab as Mark Friedberg’s stainless production designs; all wishy-washy blues and muddy browns. Passion is no more evidenced in its look than its action: The Ice Storm seems to share not just its composer (Mychael Danna) with the early work of Canada’s Atom Egoyan.

But all of this (although not, it should be pointed out, Lee’s occasionally heavy-handed ice symbolism) serves the picture brilliantly. It grits its metaphorical teeth time and again, willing its characters on, be it through the exquisite embarrassment of the key party’s manufactured bonhomie, or Ricci’s glacially detached sexual experiments. It’s in the latter that we come closest to real feeling, but Ricci’s hard-faced approach invests even that with all the human feeling of a concentration camp doctor. Her fucking Mikey in a Nixon mask is somehow even more chilling than her systematic abuse of his naive sibling.

In the coda (the plot is circular) we are allowed a inverted glimpse of the feelgood ending that could so easily have suffocated it. As it is, the film leaves us with another circle – the suggestion that these are people condemned never to learn from history, that their fuck-ups are therefore somehow genetic. ‘Love,’ wrote Moody in the original novel, ‘(is) close to indebtedness.’ This is not a film about the triumph of the human spirit, more our willingness to surrender to personal catastrophe. Taken on just about any level you care to choose, the most remarkable mainstream horror movie of the last five years.