There’s barely even any musical score to be found to underline anything, further emphasizing the emptiness of Catherine’s situation. It’s gorgeous to look at, but quickly Oldroyd and his team establish the land as a place no one in their right mind would want to live. The family employs groomsmen and farmhands, but whenever Catherine and the audience survey this kingdom, it’s impossible to see how this land could ever hope to sustain life. The ceilings are high, the walls are as pristine as off white can get, and despite this family’s supposed status, there’s curiously little adornment. The estate Catherine has been shackled to like a millstone around her neck is opulent, but empty. Oldroyd, cinematographer Ari Wegner, and production designer Jacqueline Abrahams match the stripped down bleakness of Birch’s narrative. It’s imperfect feminism by design from Birch, but also pitch-perfect anti-heroism that makes the viewer want to follow along with characters that are basically reprehensible people across the board. ![]() The dénouement and resolution finds the viewer almost inexplicably rooting for Catherine despite some underhanded and violent tactics because she has finally crawled out from beneath her oppressors by any means necessary. The second act switches things up and forces the viewer to question the choices made by Oldroyd’s heroine. The set-up allows the viewer to feel a great amount of empathy for Catherine’s situation. Birch’s reconfiguring and recontextualizing of Leskov’s material lends itself well to a unique and subtly mounted three act structure that’s primal and naturalistic. Lady Macbeth has nothing to do with Shakespeare outside of its subtly malevolent sense of escalation built around power plays and is instead adapted and updated by first time screenwriter Alice Birch from Russian writer Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 story Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk. Catherine’s unhappiness leads her to extreme measures and the fallout from her actions quickly escalates into a devious plan for personal autonomy. They begin an illicit affair that’s quickly discovered by the father-in-law. ![]() During a rare time of being left alone, Catherine catches the eye of a manly, but somewhat sleazy and sex crazed stable worker (Cosmo Jarvis, among one of this film’s many revelatory performances). Her husband gets called away to tend to a factory explosion for a lengthy period of time, and Catherine is forbidden to even leave the house for some fresh air by her more loathsome and misogynistic father-in-law (Christopher Fairbank). Lady Catherine (Florence Pugh) has entered into a marriage of status and convenience with an older, impotent, loutish, hard drinking, and aloof estate owner (Paul Hilton) in rural Victorian England. Lady Macbeth isn’t a traditional feel good movie or revenge narrative by any stretch, but it’s some of the most devilish fun artistically inclined audiences can have while squirming uncomfortably in their seats. ![]() It’s a tightly crafted and exceptionally well directed period piece spawned from an appropriately weighty script and anchored by a still emerging leading talent delivering one of the year’s best performance. One of the most quietly dazzling and nuanced debut features in recent memory, William Oldroyd’s subtly nasty Lady Macbeth heralds the arrival of several major new voices in film.
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