Also, the vintage look embargoes the movie brat trickery of the seventies that might have got things off the hook. For large stretches, little seems to move besides some lovely performances lofted by exquisite Medieval costumes. It’s frustrating to imagine the storm-lashed histrionics of Mario Bava, or a deep wash in Corman’s most psychedelic dungeon gels. At least the soundtrack by Gabriel Andrés Gallegos is gloriously eerie.
While the stately style may lack atmospheric thrills, the story and performances are riveting and coolly Hitchcockian. His extraordinary visual trickery may be absent, but a great hand with actors very much remains, and the performances are all winners. Jonah Hauer-King is gorgeous yet crappy, and Froseth and Bamber are contrastingly ethereal or game wisps ready for wrong.
“This film is as rich and exquisite as anything you’ll see this year”
There is dreamlike visual poetry throughout. When Beatrice dons a glorious suit of silver armor to do battle with a crucified villain, it ‘totally’ uses the iconography of ‘Joan of Arc vs Jesus Christ,’ as Biller herself has said. Why would Joan of Arc fight Jesus Christ, you may ask? Well, in a feminist film about a torture chamber of a marriage, this weird fallout has enough logic to soundly biff most end movie scuffles, even some of Jason Statham‘s.
This play has been adapted to the screen over thirty times, so clearly its symmetrical portrait of spousal agonies becoming supernatural explosions has some extraordinary recognition and pull in Japan at least. Its tragedy is wonderfully served by Biller’s hands until it becomes a kind of ‘reverse Kurosawa‘ – a return compliment to his Throne of Blood in the form of an absorbing English fairy tale built around the bones of an equally beloved Japanese standard. In that sense, the real ghost here is Shakespeare’s, struck into Technicolor by a sixties studio that never was. This film is as rich and exquisite as anything you’ll see this year.
"…the real ghost here is Shakespeare’s, struck into Technicolor..."
