"Foxcatcher" is a brooding, particularly American horror story of seduction, rejection, betrayal and murder set in the world of Olympic wrestling. A despairing, intentionally disturbing film that draws us into a maelstrom of desperate emotions, it holds up a dark mirror to the American dream and does not like what it sees.

Based on the true story of vastly wealthy John Eleuthere du Pont and his quixotic financial sponsorship of U.S. wrestling in general and gold medalist brothers Mark and Dave Schultz in particular, "Foxcatcher" is the latest work by director Bennett Miller, responsible for "Capote" and "Moneyball." In many ways it’s his best yet.

A project so complex and nervy that it took eight years to get made, "Foxcatcher" was financed only because of the passion of Megan Ellison and her Anna­purna Pictures, responsible as well for the likes of "American Hustle," "Her" and "Zero Dark Thirty."

The film is blessed by the extraordinary work of three actors — Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo — who lose themselves so completely in their parts they border on unrecognizable.

Getting the most attention is Carell, who turns the tables on audience expectations as the eccentric John E. du Pont, someone who has more money than he knows what to do with.

However, both Tatum and Ruffalo also undergo significant transformations to play brothers Mark and Dave Schultz, bulking up and changing both body types and the way they habitually present themselves on screen.

As written by E. Max Frye and "Capote" writer Dan Futterman, who’ve artfully condensed as well as emotionally heightened the real story, "Foxcatcher" begins in 1987 with Mark working out in a college gym, practicing takedowns on a dummy with a sullen, glowering ferocity that makes him look frightening as well as somehow vulnerable.

Mark (whose memoir, also called "Foxcatcher," has just been published) may have won an Olympic gold medal three years earlier, but he does not look happy as he grinds it out in preparation for the forthcoming world championships.

Another largely wordless scene has Mark working out with his older brother and fellow gold medalist, Dave, someone he admires yet seems to resent.

The physicality of their interaction couldn’t be more authentic (both Ruffalo and his father before him were accomplished high school wrestlers). Plus the way the actors allow their wrestling moves to reflect their relationship is so intuitively done here that Bennett said at Cannes (where "Foxcatcher" won him the director prize) that it enabled him to cut an entire scene of dialogue.

As "Foxcatcher" unfolds it concerns itself with quintessentially American issues of wealth, power, class and entitlement, as well as the baffling complexities of masculine interaction and dependence.

We also get to see Mark’s borderline impoverished lifestyle, so we understand how mind-blowing it is when he gets a call from a du Pont functionary inviting him to an all-expenses-paid visit to the family’s lavish Foxcatcher estate.

As if he were reading Mark’s mind, du Pont also wants to talk about America, about patriotism, about a country that "fails to honor" what the wrestler has accomplished.

Du Pont shows him a huge, well-appointed wrestling facility he has built, and talks about his dream of helping American wrestlers triumph in the world by living and working on site.

Mark hopes the genial, gregarious Dave, who has all the social graces he lacks, will join him at Foxcatcher, but his brother also has a wife (Siena Miller), two children and commitments. Mark, who has an unacknowledged need to separate from Dave, will have to go on his own.

For now.

Though it never pushes an agenda, "Foxcatcher" is at its most acute in its insights into what we value in America, the deference our nominally egalitarian society pays to inherited wealth and power, how we allow ourselves to slide unaware into the most awful situations.

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times