BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! Anna Biller, the writer and director of the neo-gothic ‘horror’ story The Face of Horror, most recently brought us 2016’s The Love Witch, where Samantha Robinson’s aristocratic looks and some very crisp lipstick outlined the supernatural woes of Wiccans who love too much. Biller showed a nice ripple of auteurist muscle with her blazingly beautiful West Coast style, designing and hand-making for years the costumes and sets, as well as scoring, producing, writing, and directing.
This is her first feature since, and just to complicate things further, she takes multiple sources of historical inspiration: a 19th-century Japanese Kabuki play (Yotsuya Kaidan) switched to late medieval England and presented with vintage film grammar.
“They tell the girls it was some random bandits, then propose while their murdered beloved are still warm.”
Biller changes the evil samurai climbing in and out of the beds of two women who should know better to the dashing, villainous knight of merry old England, Edward Carnifex (Jonah Hauer-King). Edward is introduced to us gleefully running through a priest while pillaging a village with his heinous squire, Richard (Leo Suter). When caught with ransacked church booty by the father of his paramour and her sister’s husband, he and Richard kill both men.
They tell the girls it was some random bandits, then propose while their murdered beloved are still warm. Eleanor (Kristine Froseth) agrees to marry Edward, and her now-widowed sister, Beatrice (Ellie Bamber), marries Richard, on the condition that she’ll take his name only when her husband is avenged. Things then escalate – at some length – until a dénouement featuring a wrathful spirit’s bloody revenge.
This is an enchanting interpretation of a terrific story but its presentation may divide viewers. While nominally horror, you won’t feel it much in Biller’s direction. There is not enough smoke, certainly not enough shadow. It feels like the Prague production struggled to dress cinematographer David Mullen’s glorious technicolor and Pavel Vojtisek’s sets with the same lavish cobwebs and lightning flashes which made Hammer and Corman pulsate with foreboding.
"…the real ghost here is Shakespeare’s, struck into Technicolor..."
