Her growing sense of empty frustration is sharply complemented by Jacqueline Abrahams’ production design, which foregoes “Downton Abbey” opulence for a coldly rustic, half-finished puritanism. Like a captive princess in a particularly dour fairytale, Katherine is instructed by her brusque husband and brusquer father-in-law to remain indoors, attending to what limited wifely duties their ample staff of servants (including her impassive handmaid Anna, excellently played with a half-sympathetic, half-critical eye by Naomi Ackie) don’t cover. Birch’s script and Nick Emerson’s economical editing establish the terms of this trap in quick, calm strokes: We’re swiftly taken to the conjugal bed, where Alexander - who seems no keener on the arrangement than she - is unable to consummate the marriage.
#LADY MACBETH FLORENCE PUGH PATCH#
To the menfolk in her life, she is quite literally a commodity: Sold by her father, in a package deal with a bonus patch of land, to elderly colliery magnate Boris (Christopher Fairbank), she’s forced into nuptials to Boris’s glumly unprepossessing, middle-aged son Alexander (Paul Hilton). In 1865, on an anonymous stretch of farmland streaked in shades of moss and mud, teenage bride Katherine (Pugh) has barely any human liberties left to call her own. The corruption of its characters emerges gradually, in pursuit not of power but of sexual freedom - a kind of power in itself, of course, not least for women still bound to the gender hierarchy of 19th-century England. Shrewdly adapted (and anglicised) by first-time scribe Alice Birch from Russian writer Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk,” “Lady Macbeth” will throw any viewers who approach it seeking overt allusions or parallels to the Scottish Play. Though the film’s austere outlook compromises its commercial appeal to the Masterpiece Theater crowd, it has the makings of a more rarefied arthouse conversation piece. This disquieting drama of an arranged marriage gone drastically awry may come to be most remembered, however, as the film that gave 19-year-old Florence Pugh her first leading-lady showcase: Fully realizing the promise of earlier, smaller parts, the British actress impresses with precocious poise, sensuality and venom in a still-waters role just about worthy of the film’s eponymous inspiration. Shakespeare’s conniving Queen of Scotland is nowhere to be found in it, but a whole lot of courage gets screwed to the sticking place in “ Lady Macbeth.” An impressively stark, narratively ruthless Victorian chamber piece that feels about as modern as its crinolines will permit, William Oldroyd’s pristine debut feature slowly reveals a violent moral ambiguity that needles the mind far longer than its polite period-piece trappings suggest.
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