New releases
Ammonite
Dir: Francis Lee (1hr 58mins) (15)
★★★★
This “absorbing” drama about forbidden love in 1840s Dorset “brings together two superb performers”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Kate Winslet plays Mary Anning, the palaeontologist whose extraordinary fossil finds were “coolly appropriated” by the male scientific establishment, forcing her to run a curios shop in Lyme Regis to get by; and Saoirse Ronan is geologist Charlotte Murchison, a gentlewoman who is sent to lodge with Mary by her husband Roderick (James McArdle) in the hopes that “sea air and healthy scientific thoughts” will cure her melancholia. In fact, Charlotte’s problem is his “passionless dullness”. Joining Mary on windswept fossil hunting expeditions, she gradually comes alive and, though Mary is a tough woman, who wears “a look of perpetual wary resentment”, their friendship gives way to passion.
Winslet is “to-hell-with-it-truthful” in her portrayal of this “stubborn, ingrown soul”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times, and Ronan is “winning and radiant”, in a film in which metaphors abound: even their lovemaking “has an edge of roughness, as if they were still manhandling rocks”. There is something impressive in the “elemental” physicality of it all, but the film makes such a fetish of “spartan self-deprivation”, it suffers by comparison with another recent period lesbian romance, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. And it’s not as good as its director’s own 2017 debut,
God’s Own Country, said Kevin Maher in The Times. That Yorkshire-set romance had real warmth, but Ammonite is flat and soulless, with “strangely muted” performances. Available on Apple, Google, Sky Store and Amazon.
Violation
Dirs: Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine SimsFewer (1hr 47mins) (unrated)
★★★★
Shot through with “blood-draining frights”, this rape revenge thriller has a pitch-dark mood that is not easy to shake or describe, said Tomris Laffly in Variety. Co-writer and co-director Madeleine Sims-Fewer plays Miriam, a young Londoner who visits her sister Greta (Anna Maguire) and Greta’s husband Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe) at their remote home in Quebec. Miriam’s own marriage to Caleb (Obi Abili) is on the rocks, and rivalries left over from childhood distance her from Greta, too. Only Dylan offers her warmth, and one night, Miriam kisses him beside a lake. Later, he enters her room and rapes her. Unable to confide in Caleb, and scorned by Greta, Miriam takes matters into her own hands.
What follows is “possibly the most brutal woman-on-man ordeal since Audition”, said Phil Hoad in The Guardian. But it also “feels like something from the ancient world” – a “single, abject act of reprisal”, not a “fantasy spree”. Apparently, Sims-Fewer drank a pint of salt water so that she could vomit for the course of one 78-second shot. She shows “a staggering physical commitment” to the role, her face becoming “a glistening mask”, bringing to mind the Furies. The film evokes Miriam’s “trauma-addled” state of mind by unfolding out of chronological order, said Lena Wilson in The New York Times. It is at once dreamlike and “punishingly real”, a “gutsy”, “nuanced”, female-centred addition to the genre, more unsettling, but less exploitative, than many of its predecessors. Available on Shudder.