Lady Macbeth (2016) Review

In the 19th Century Katherine is sold to a much older man as a young bride and must deal with her new “life” as a wife. With tiredness and boredom setting in it isn’t long before she finds something to pass the time.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Not to be confused with Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare, this film does not hold back in anyway. We have sex, passion, murder and some brilliant performances to go with all of that drama. It is also very bleak and difficult to watch at times, but I think that is part of its charm in all honesty. Surely we don’t want to see everything being so nice all of the time.

I thought Katherine was a very interesting character as your feelings towards her really do change from the start to the finish of the film. At first you cannot help but feel sorry for her and the situation she has found herself in, with the husband who does not want her, the father in law who is overpowering and having to stay in the house all of the time. That slowly changes as she changes and is consumed by the life she is in, everything changes that first time she sees Sebastian.

It is pretty obvious what is going to happen next with Sebastian and those scenes don’t really leave anything to the imagination. That was all pretty unexpected and it was rather passionate and hot. The turn I was not expecting the film to take was the murder and having to deal with that. Pretty impressive really and makes you think about what people could get away with then, probably a slightly sadistic way to think about things.

I was massively impressed with Florence Pugh in the film, I really don’t find myself blown away by performances very often but this one really was something special. I would certainly say it should be her breakout performance and we should expect to see a lot more from her in the future. Certainly not something I have said very often!

The accent and location were something that I spent most of the film trying to work out as I thought it was Irish/Scottish to begin with then it sounded rather Geordie aka North East England accent and that seemed to get more and more throughout, especially with Katherine. Which was obviously something that I rather enjoyed about it.

Recommendation for this film is something I am not really too sure about in complete honesty as while the performances were solid it was overall a very strange and messed up film. I have found out over the years that not many people really seem to like strange and messed up things. So I guess I have well and truly ended up on the fence in the evaluation of this film. It is rather haunting as I have been thinking about parts of it since seeing it last night, so I guess that backs up just how powerful it was.