Birthday Girl is most notable as a 90-minute advertisement for Nicole Kidman’s career. Terrific as Nadia, a Russian mail-order bride who comes to America speaking not a word of English, it’s Kidman who holds the film together with a supremely kittenish performance that gradually accumulates more layers. It’s not a meaty role to play, but Kidman consummates it. (It’s definitely her year; this is her third outstanding appearance on American movie screens in less than nine months.) You may not even stop to wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to hire actual Russians to play Russians rather than this ubiquitous Australian.

Also pretending to be Russians are the very French Vincent Cassel (late of Brotherhood of the Wolf) and Mathieu Kassovitz (visible in Amélie) as the scuzzy twosome who follow her to England and crash at her place. Ben Chaplin (of The Thin Red Line fame) is John, the hapless groom who paid Nadia’s way to St. Albans but finds himself terrorized by her uninvited companions. You can file this one in between Something Wild and B. Monkey, both of them movies about everyday schmoes who find themselves wrapped up in the lives of dangerous women. John’s dreams of prefab marital bliss head south when Nadia’s friends threaten to kill her unless he brings them a large sum of money.

Chaplin makes a fine protagonist, nicely developing the rube of the opening reels into a more confident man. Like Kidman, he brings life to a thin, programmatic role. Cassel and Kassovitz, especially, turn in similarly handsome performances; the trouble is that nothing that happens in the film is surprising – or convincing, for that matter. For instance, poor John’s decision to turn criminal on a dime—all of his human reactions to the terrible situation he’s place in—isn’t explored at all. On the other hand, the film’s brevity is welcome, since such a flimsy yarn would buckle under any more weight.

And there is a lot about Birthday Girl that’s attractive. The fantasy of importing a beautiful woman from overseas who turns out to be a more complicated proposition—but winds up wanting to have sex with you anyway—has titillating appeal, and Kidman is nothing if not accommodating. (An amusing early scene showing Nadia perusing John’s porn stash for tips and tricks while he’s away at work turns out to be a cheat, since we later learn that she’s not the wide-eyed innocent the camera sees from its privileged point of view.) The film’s key joke is John’s status as powerless wage slave, and after the scenario goes sour, director Jez Butterworth milks more absurd comedy as John wrestles control of his life back.

Of course, things never go too sour, or become too threatening. Butterworth remains defiantly laid-back—the only gun we see turns out to be a cigarette lighter, which I suppose is refreshing on some level. The result is that the breezy first section of the film, in which John gets to know his stimulating new companion, is the most satisfying. The ensuing complications are superficial, meaning that Birthday Girl remains a lightweight exercise from start to finish—a naive-but-growing-ever-wiser protagonist, a beautiful woman, a couple of Russian con artists, and a happy ending after all.