From the producers of The King's Speech comes the feature film adaptation of Shakespeare's Scottish play about General Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) whose ambitious wife (Marion Cotillard) urges him to use wicked means in order to gain power of the throne over the sitting king.
The Scottish play is Shakespeare's leanest tragedy, barely 2500 lines as against Lear's 3500 and Hamlet's 4000. Yet this dark and bloodsoaked version, by Australian director Kurzel, uses barely half of them.
What's most striking about the film, which will doubtless annoy textual purists but will surely excite movie fans,is how eerily quiet it is. Lines that are traditionally bellowed - the tyrant king's rave at Banquo's ghost, say, or Macduff's "Turn, hellhound, turn!", or every word of the witches - are uttered with a restraint that makes the menace almost palpable.
Other action is stripped to the bare bones: Macduff's wife and children are not slaughtered, but captured in a 90-line chase scene reduced to a single repeated word. Then, when Macbeth burns them all at the stake, the script gives Lady Macduff a line of Malcolm's from the next scene, which with hideous aptness, speaks of how the tyrant's name "blisters our tongues".
The leanness of the script is consistent with Kurzel's plain intention to make a Macbeth that is primarily cinematic, and there are flights of cinematic fancy galore.
It opens with the funeral of a Macbeth child and we are invited to conclude he loses a teenage son in the following battle. This does more than just make sense of Lady Macbeth's later "I have given suck ... " speech: it makes the murderous couple's actions part of a monstrously twisted attempt to ensure their line's survival.
Macbeth's obsession with "Banquo's issue" comes sharply into focus.
Elsewhere, Kurzel (The Turning and the based-on-fact serial killer drama Snowtown) moves characters into scenes they were never in, forcing us to reassess their motives; Malcolm's flight after Duncan's murder, for example, is given a hideously plausible explanation.
Mario Cotillard as Lady Macbeth.
In short, this is an intelligent and provocative reading and it's also a bloody good film. DP Adam Arkapaw, who shot Animal Kingdom, another story of batshit-crazy killing, washes endless highland vistas with red light, perhaps tipping a hat to Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, and the battle scenes, often slipping into super slo-mo, are hideously exact.
Heading an excellent ensemble (Considine lends the thankless role of Banquo a heartbreakingly doomed decency), Fassbender and Cotillard are superb. His muscular Macbeth moves much more quickly than is traditional from follower to instigator and her meltdown begins long before Act V.
Best, Fassbender makes of Macbeth a complicated villain. When he says "O, full of scorpions is my mind," we almost feel them crawling. He gives us a man descending into madness, not a defiant big-mouth. In the age of Assad, it's a pretty compelling reading.
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Paddy Considine, Sean Harris, Elizabeth Debicki, David Thewlis Director: Justin Kurzel Running time: 113 mins Rating: R16 (graphic violence) Verdict: Hideously brilliant and apt to our age.
