Angelina Jolie (right) plays a single mother whose son disappears in Clint Eastwood's 1920s thriller Changeling. (Universal Pictures)In 1928, a single mother in Los Angeles named Christine Collins left her nine-year-old son, Walter, at home while she accepted a last-minute shift at the phone company. When she returned that evening, he was gone.

This true story is the stuff of horror, and Changeling director Clint Eastwood casts each scene in ghostly grey, leeching Los Angeles of colour — except for Collins’s red lips, which famously belong to the actress who plays her, Angelina Jolie. A few months after the disappearance, the Los Angeles police present the bereft mother with a little boy. The cops are having a PR crisis — they’ve been a touch rogue, shooting maybe-criminals without trial and tossing bodies curbside the way some people toss cigarette butts — and now they have a good news day on their hands. Say cheese for the cameras, Mrs. Collins!

But there’s a rather large wrench in the reunion plan: Collins is certain that the child is not hers. The sleazy police captain, J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), a man with too many teeth for his mouth, insists that she is simply “driven by intuition and emotion” — she’s too female, in other words, to recognize her own son. He labels her a “bad mother” for questioning the boy’s identity, and, as all moms know, that’s the ultimate throwdown. Reeling, Collins takes the strange little guy to her home, all the while requesting, in a most ladylike manner, that the police get their crap together and find her real son.

L.A. police captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan, centre) tries to exploit Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) for good publicity. (Universal Pictures) Despite the cowboy hat, Eastwood has often tucked a feminist perspective into the corners of his movies, and moved it straight to the forefront in Million Dollar Baby. Collins’s gender, the thing that made her a mother in the first place, is suddenly her greatest liability in the fight to get her boy back. (That she’s a single working mother adds a nice little modern subtext: this category is elided from today’s family values-hockey mom moment, too). When Collins goes to the press with the real story, doctors on the police payroll conspire to label her insane, and she’s committed to an asylum.

Here, the film starts dividing and multiplying. The women’s-nuthouse genre is territory well-trod: Once Jolie is naked on the receiving end of a fire hose, it can’t be long before the other zombified inmates start clawing at her from fetid hospital corners. (Didn’t Jolie herself play one of those in Girl, Interrupted?) As expected, a sane-ish confidante appears to share, over a plate of gruel, the kind of inmate wisdom that will get our heroine through. (The role is played by the excellent Amy Ryan, as a prostitute committed for standing up to an LAPD officer who beat her.)

Collins’s champion on the outside is Gustav Brieglib (John Malkovich, furious and fey and the best there is at his thing — call it Malkovichianesquism). Brieglib is a minister who uses his pulpit to radio-broadcast diatribes against the corruption of the police department. Thrust into the minister’s justice-seeking narrative, the mother is now a hero, a social reformer who isn’t entirely up to the task.

Jolie plays Collins as bewildered and never too valiant. This vote for restraint makes the movie a little inert — one hopes for a sense of movement in a lead — but it’s also a strength of the performance. Jolie conveys Collins’s fear and shock by doing, as Collins would, very little.

Allow me to digress for a moment: I would be remiss in writing about this film if I didn’t mention that Jolie is terribly, dangerously skinny from first frame to last. It looks like the wardrobe people couldn’t find clothes small enough to fit her. And in the scene where she’s naked in the shower, a glimpse of her all-bone back drew a gasp from the audience and, next to me, a cry of “My God, she is so skinny!” — and that was hardly the intention of the dramatic moment. Who knows the personal circumstances that took her to this place, but it is truly distracting in the film, and on a more urgent human level, she looks ill enough to warrant intervention. When Christian Bale got deathly skinny in The Machinist, it made headlines. The fashion industry chatters about fattening up the wispy ranks of models. But Hollywood says very little about the Incredible Shrinking Actress phenomenon. Couldn’t Eastwood have forced a snack break, not only for the integrity of the character, but for the health of this talented actress?

Changeling is long, almost two-and-a-half hours, and it shifts from a Frances incarnation to a serial killer drama, one that may be connected to Walter’s disappearance. Eventually, the ghost story begets yet another kind of horror: the tedious courtroom drama. The script, by J. Michael Straczynski, doubles your pleasure, or pain, by moving back and forth between two trials, with a child murderer in one, and the police department in another.

John Malkovich co-stars as a minister who uses his pulpit to rail against police corruption. (Universal Pictures)Eastwood is known to shoot briskly and efficiently, and he never shies from the big cinematic gesture. This old-fashioned tendency towards melodrama worked well in Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River, but Changeling isn’t as bold. It doesn’t surprise our emotions, it only affirms them. There are only so many times in one film that you can shake your head over injustice before your neck starts to hurt. J.J. Jones is a police chief so evil, so without conscience, that he ceases to matter in any meaningful way. Evil that evil is too uncomplicated to be interesting.

The film does look fabulous, scaffolded by historically accurate set-dressing that includes a parade of cloche hats and bobs. And there are strong performances all over the place from many underused actors (Jason Butler Harner as the possible serial killer, and a child actor named Eddie Alderson, as his accomplice, who brings the film’s emotional zenith).

But Changeling shouldn’t have been merely an exercise in quality filmmaking; it should have disturbed and disordered the viewer. A film about child abduction needs to leave you staggering, like the world has gone wrong, like the centre cannot hold. Changeling is inherently sad, but it lacks feeling. It is an Oscar-clamouring film that looks profound, but is really just a pretender.

Changeling opens in Toronto Oct. 24, and in other Canadian cities Oct. 31.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.