If Birthday Girl is a far-fetched thriller, it's also a slice of absurdist fun populated by some awfully interesting actors. Nicole Kidman plays Sophia, a chain-smoking, mascara-smudged, wildly sexual mail-order bride from Russia who answers an Internet plea for companionship from a lonely British bank employee, John (Ben Chaplin). For a while, the two make a startling and intriguing pair: she apparently speaks no English and he naively frets over the veracity of the Web business that brought them together. The gorgeous Kidman and sad-eyed Chaplin are briefly the engine of their own unique movie, but then the other shoe drops. Sophia, obviously up to something mysterious, is paid a visit on her birthday by two Russian "cousins" (French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz and one of his own frequent stars, Vincent Cassel, also seen in Brotherhood of the Wolf). Suddenly, John's quest for a lover becomes a web of deceit and corruption. Directed and cowritten (with his brother Tom) by Jez Butterworth, Birthday Girl is hampered a bit by sluggishness and insufficient character development. But it is also original and strikingly entertaining. Tom Keogh