Searing version of Scottish play
Mad grief over the loss of a child, not ambition, drives Justin Kurzel’s haunted interpretation of Macbeth, Shakespeare’s tragedy of cursed action and bloody reckoning.
It stars Michael Fassbender as the murderous general of infamy and Marion Cotillard as his complicit wife. Two of the world’s finest actors, they make a magnetic pair.
This new telling of the Scottish play is a movie of natural elements and supernatural ones, directed by Australia’s Kurzel ( The Snowtown Murders).
He has an eye to maximize the unforgiving mountain terrain of the film’s Isle of Skye shooting locale and also the tortured mental state of its protagonists, which Fassbender has likened to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Searing to both the eye and mind, it’s like the Bard by way of The Blair Witch Project, resembling the horror classic with its exterior threats and interior terror, a malicious female entity and missing children also being common to both films.
Macbeth opens in 11th-century Scotland, not with the witchy “weird sisters” of Shakespeare’s original telling — although they soon make their manipulative presence felt — but rather with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth attending the funeral of their young son, the suggestion being it’s not the first time they’ve suffered through the death of a child. They don’t have much time to grieve, because Macbeth must take up arms to protect King Duncan (David Thewlis) and, indeed, all of Scotland, from threats both within and without the realm.
Battle scenes are staged with no quarter given to the squeamish, with some of the bloody action shown in slo-mo. Macbeth emerges triumphant, his face smeared with warrior paint, blood and mud, but he soon falls prey to a trio of witches who seem to have emerged from the wild grass of the battlefield.
They predict trouble for Duncan’s realm and also foretell Macbeth’s ascension to the throne, a transition that won’t happen peacefully.
But while Macbeth is all too eager to make the prediction come true, as is Lady Macbeth, the conventional reading that the couple is motivated by a lust for power doesn’t really apply to this searing telling of the tale.
Director Justin Kurzel has an eye to maximize the unforgiving mountain terrain of the film’s Isle of Skye shooting locale