Lady Macbeth

The source is not Shakespeare but Nikolai Leskov's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, written in the 1860s. William Oldroyd moves the story from Russia to the north of Victorian England. Katherine is seventeen, married off as though sold along with a piece of land. Her husband does not touch her, her father-in-law confines her to the house, she is forbidden to go outside. When both men leave, she is alone for the first time, and an affair begins with Sebastian, one of the farm workers. What she turns out to be prepared to do is the film's real subject. The playwright Alice Birch wrote the script and Ari Wegner shot it. It was completed in twenty-four shooting days, after Oldroyd asked for ten days of rehearsal beforehand. It runs eighty-nine minutes. This was Florence Pugh's first major part and the foundation of her career. Its hardest quality is refusing to ignore class and race: Katherine's liberation exacts a price from the maid Anna and from Sebastian, and the film leaves that in the viewer's face. Who it is for: viewers who like cold, unornamented period films shot in fixed frames. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a sympathetic lead.