In director Susanne Bier's After the Wedding drama, Oscar-winners Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro play two people brought together by an unfortunate act of fate.

At the start of the film, Audrey Burke (Berry) has just had to face up to the sudden news that her rock, the love of her life, her doting husband Brian (David Duchovny), and father of their two young children, has been killed.

Susanne Bier then proceeds to drip-feed us bits of information so that by the end of the film, you will see just how Brian came to be killed in a random act of violence.

Audrey without Brian, feels very alone. Needing comfort, she turns to Brian's best friend Jerry Sunborne (Del Toro), a down-and-out druggie, who Audrey previously didn't take much of a shine to, perhaps because she thought her husband had befriended a loser and a bum. She sees him though at the funeral, knows Jerry was her husband's closest friend since childhood and somehow feels closer to Brian, in talking about him to Jerry.

So Audrey invites the reforming junkie to move into a room adjacent to their garage in the hope that he can help both her and her children to cope with their sudden loss. This will be a rocky road with predictable highs and lows.

The performances here aren't half-bad. Berry looks like she really believes in her role as grief-stricken Audrey and Benicio Del Toro makes a good ex-junkie. Duchovny has the dullest role as the unbelievably squeaky-clean and extra nice hubby Brian.

The film starts well and there's little wrong with the basic premise. Without wishing to give much away, it comes unstuck late on when in true melodramatic fashion, Audrey has to go and find Jerry in the areas of the town where junkies hang out and even though she has no knowledge of these dingy squats and drives a spankingly decent 4 x 4 straight into the heart of it (like you would if you wanted to find your car still there seconds later), and once having got out of her beautiful car, Audrey then zeroes in on exactly where Jerry is amongst all these druggies, almost as if she had a homing device !

As a film about love and loss and coming to terms with grief, it means well but is just slightly laboured and a little contrived at times. Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro are the best things in it.

It's the things that have got lost in the plot rather than anything lost in the fire that have made this drama just a little tepid.