Lady Macbeth reviewed by Mark Kermode

To the cinema here's some other new stuff. So Lady Macbeth, directed by William Oldroyd, adapted from Nikolai Leskov's lurid Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which has inspired various adaptations, operas, films, Siberian Lady Macbeth from 1962. So this latest incarnation transfers the story to the rugged landscapes of north-east England, Victorian era, where you get sort of repression and rebellion in equal measure, I have to say brilliantly adapted for the screen by writer Alice Birch. Florence Pugh is the young bride, Catherine, who is perfunctorily married to this pathetic rage-fuelled colliery heir, whose father has basically purchased her along with a plot of land that he describes as being not fit for a cow to graze upon. At first her situation seems utterly stifling. It's almost like it's going to, you know, just send her to sleep. But then there is this strange sort of straw-dogs-inflected showdown with Cosmo Jarvis's groomsman, Sebastian, after which Catherine begins to exert her independence and soon she's making a new life with Sebastian and turning the world upside down and proving more than a match for any man. Here's a clip. Do you love me? Do you adore me? Of course. What could you do without me? It's husbands and wives that kiss like that. Did your husband kiss you, Catherine? She won't speak. You know I shan't be parted from your life, Sebastian. Through hell and high water I will follow you. To the cross, to the prison, to the grave, to the sky. I'd rather stop you breathing than have you doubt how I feel. There's so much to like about Lady Macbeth and coming off the back of that clip, one of the things to point out is that one of the things that's really great about it is the sound design, which I know seems like a weird thing to sort of... No, not at all. That sounded very blowy. Yeah, you could hear that. And actually what happens all the way through it is that it contrasts the sounds of nature, of the outside, the kind of passion of the outside and the moors and the sort of rugged landscape with this almost sort of expressionist clatter that you get within the household in which it's crockery and shutters and doors and furniture and everything clangs and bangs and seems unnaturally loud. And it's a very, very well-constructed soundscape. I have to say, really sort of beautifully put together, minimal music cues. I only spotted three music cues in the whole piece. When they come in, they come in in a very sort of subtle and slightly eerie and slightly unearthly way. So an awful lot of the story is told through that soundscape, and I think it does it brilliantly in a way that perhaps you wouldn't notice immediately whilst you're watching, but just listening to that clip, it really, really strikes me. Of course, right at the centre of it is a fabulous performance by Florence Pugh, who we saw before in Carol Morley's The Falling, who is absolutely a rising star of the moment. She's been called, I think, one of those foolish things, people say, oh, she's the new Kate Winslet, which kind of doesn't mean anything at all. She's really sort of intelligent and brave and a fearless performer, and I think she's terrific in this. She really captures the central thing about the drama is that what you have to do is balance audience sympathy and revulsion all the way through, so that no matter what happens, no matter how the narrative takes us, and you'll know from the title, Lady Macbeth, that there will be a certain amount of guilt and death involved in the way the narrative unfolds. But what she has to do is she has to ensure that the audience is captured, the audience is gripped, the audience is in a weird way on her side, so that when things start to turn nasty, it implicates the audience in ways which are very complex and very well done. I think that the cinematography by Ari Wagner is terrific. These kind of widescreen frames that absolutely, on the one hand, have this great stillness that to some extent reminded me of the work of Michael Haneke during some of the movie's darker moments that other times evoked, although it's very different because it's four by three Andrea Arnold with Wuthering Heights, that same sense of that kind of lusty, tactile exterior shot that you get. Again, it's a completely different screen ratio, but very much the same in the sense of tactility, the sense of physicality. Terrific, I think, piece of work from William Oldroyd, who is a theatre director who has apparently come to the cinema, he's made short films before, but he has really sort of mastered the form of cinema, and I think it's a really terrific piece of work from him, suggests that he's going to do wonderful stuff in the future. Interestingly, with such a great central performance, admirable too that all the supporting performances which is always a strange phrase, all the other performances around Florence Pugh's performance are great. They are varied, they are diverse. It is a movie in which we don't get that kind of whitewashed view of old period history in which the movie is strange and subversive in ways which it doesn't openly declare, in which it doesn't feel the need to stand up and say, look how subversive we're doing. It's sly, it's occasionally very, very funny, it's occasionally very, very dark, it's got a kind of electric quality while you're watching it. As I said, I've watched it twice now. The first time I watched it was on a fairly small screen, the second time I watched it was on a much bigger screen, and I have to say it is a very cinematic experience, particularly again, when we're talking about that soundscape, the way in which it's a movie which is a very immersive experience in which it's very beautifully choreographed and beautifully controlled. I thought it was a really, really good, solid piece of work that really gets under your skin and drags you in and takes you to places that you hadn't perhaps expected to go and does so in a way which is, I think, really adventurous and yet at the same time doesn't declare its adventurousness. It's not a film that's standing up and saying, look what we're doing here. It's just getting on with it. And as I said, very, very well written, very well directed and solidly played by the entire ensemble cast with a particular standout by Florence Pugh who is on her way to being an absolutely huge star.