THE THRILL OF THE CHILL
First-time writer and director impress with spare, but brilliant, Lady Macbeth
The poster for Lady Macbeth shows what looks to be a prim 19th-century woman in a blue dress, her skirts taking up more room on the chesterfield than a rude dude on a bus. The source material for first-time writer Alice Birch and first-time feature director William Oldroyd is the 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov. Everything suggests a demure costume drama.
Don’t be fooled. The central character, named Katherine, starts the movie decorously enough, but is soon embroiled in all manner of evil, frightening and unnatural deeds in the remote and tiny English estate where she has been sold into a
loveless marriage to a man twice her age. By the time the story ended, a mere 89 minutes later, I was almost in need of smelling salts. Or a hot shower — anything to take away the plot’s chill.
The chill’s the thing, however. Katherine is played by Florence Pugh, another almost-newcomer, with a few slight credits to her name. But you’ll be seeing more of her, no doubt, such a force is she in Lady Macbeth. Collected, calm, cool and steely, she submits to her husband’s wedding-night requests (he tells her to take off her nightdress, then promptly goes to bed) and to some savage hair brushing from her passiveaggressive maid (Naomi Ackie).
But when her husband (Paul Hilton) is called away — some sort of explosion, undoubtedly common in Industrial Revolution-era Britain — she takes to wandering; first outside the house, then into the arms of one of the servants, a rough beast named Sebastian, played by Cosmo Jarvis.
At first, it looks as though Sebastian is going to rape her. But when she turns the tables and becomes the aggressor you can almost feel his world being turned inside out. He is at once terrified and excited. The question now becomes what the lovers will do when her husband reappears on the estate.
Oldroyd makes a virtue out of a tiny budget (reportedly half a million pounds, or about $800,000) by keeping the sets small and simple. Katherine’s husband may be landed gentry, but he’s hardly wealthy. The film’s score, meanwhile, is equally spare. Often, the only sound accompanying the action is a ticking grandfather clock, which I swear in one scene starts to slow down, as though time itself were grinding to a halt.
The tightly bound narrative provides little in the way of backstory. Even the year is unknown, although the appearance of a camera in one scene suggests the 1860s or a little later, which matches the source novella. Katherine’s affair cannot exist outside of time, however. Soon a bizarre twist threatens the life she has crafted; her solution is as brutal as it is brilliant.
Pugh’s performance fits those adjectives and more, while Oldroyd’s naturalistic camerawork grounds the story, giving it an almost documentary realism. All of which raises a unique question for the filmmakers and actors alike: What do you do next, if at first you DO succeed? I can’t wait to find out.