SECONDSCREEN
Turkey has been much in the news of late, giving a fresh and frankly alarming edge to The Promise (12A) an initially romantic-looking but ultimately harrowing drama set against the Armenian genocide of the First World War, when, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled, 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by Ottoman Turks.
The period-evoking visual effects aren’t always great and the whole thing is delivered in heavily accented English, but Oscar Isaac is solid as the Armenian medical student who arrives in cosmopolitan, pre-war Constantinople only to find himself torn between the bewitching Ana (Charlotte Le Bon, lighting up every scene she is in) and the trusting fiancée he left behind in his home village.
But as war breaks out, being torn between two lovers – not to mention having to share one with an American journalist (Christian Bale) – is the least of his problems in a film that shows Belfast director Terry George, who more than a dozen years ago brought us the emotionally searing Hotel Rwanda, hasn’t lost his eye for an important story or his talent for telling it.
William Oldroyd’s new film – his debut feature, in fact – may be called
Lady Macbeth (16) but for the opening half-hour it seems more like a cross between Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Wuthering Heights as the newly married but instantly rejected Katherine (Florence Pugh) finds solace in the arms of her husband’s ruggedly handsome new groomsman, Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis).
And quite right too, we initially think, as she drifts unhappily around a house that is as cold and unwelcoming as her cruel husband. With a father-in-law (Christopher Fairbank) who’s even worse than his son and a maid, Anna (Naomi Ackie), too frightened to be a friend, why shouldn’t the poor lonely girl take a lover? The clue is all in the title. Katherine, you see, is no hapless victim.
It’s a tough old watch with performances that are good rather than great and with racist undercurrents that stir the already murky moral waters.