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Cold, Bleak and Troubling, Lady Macbeth Is April’s Best Anti-Blockbuster Film

If you hate Downton Abbey, you’ll love this

Words  Greg Taylor


★★★★

It’s extremely grim up north in William Oldroyd’s dark, stark period piece based on a 19th Century Russian novel of repression, liberation and murder. Transposed to the bleak outlands of England, the film charts the experiences and transformation of Katherine (Florence Pugh), a young woman flogged off to a local landowner as part of a property deal, who is required to shut up, look good and breed. But when her feckless, violent husband is incapable of consummating the marriage and disappears off with his father, Katherine takes up a grubby farmhand as a lover, stakes her authority over the homestead and its workers, and mines the inner reserves of pragmatic viciousness required to maintain her newfound liberation against constant waves of encroaching patriarchy and control.

Florence Pugh, in her first leading role, brings impressive maturity and ambiguity to a complex role…

Bereft of music, colour and decoration, Lady Macbeth is a cold, troubling affair from start to finish. The interiors are as empty and depressing as the lives of those caught in them, while the rural exteriors teem with muck, poison and death, making any escape seem all but impossible. Cruelty abounds as the powerful cement their dominion over the powerless in this desolate hell, and within that context Katherine’s extreme actions emerge as strangely naturalistic rather than outlandishly evil. Florence Pugh, in her first leading role, brings impressive maturity and ambiguity to a complex role while Naomi Ackie also shines as an abused maidservant helplessly entangled in Florence’s scheming.

Coming on like the anti-Downton Abbey, bereft of all but the most transitory joys, Lady Macbeth is an agonising antidote to the spectacular dull-headedness of blockbuster season and will be a real treat for those who find Jude the Obscure a little too light-hearted for their tastes.

 

Lady Macbeth opens on 28th April and is rated 15

Lady Macbeth 

In cinemas April 28th

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