Gothic

Ken Russell, I love you and your sick, horny mind. Gothic is sweaty, hedonistic, and sexually liberated and repressed in equal measure. It’s a nasty, psychedelic fever dream/nightmare in which its characters relinquish their morals and inhibitions and allow every self-indulgent desire to run wholly and damningly rampant. Catholic guilt! Repressed homosexuality!!! The occult! Paganism! Sex! Drugs! Eyeball Nipples™!!! General, orgy-fueled depravity!!! It’s all grime and gluttony, creating this wonderfully suffocating, claustrophobic descent into a clusterfuck of rivals/lovers/tormentors feeding off one another’s fears, desires, guilt, and fantasies until it all becomes one dark, sex-possessed spiral. It’s absurd, theatrical, and utterly consumed by its own excess, with nods to and references of gothic art and literature. Also, a huge, resounding THANK YOU to Mr. Russell for the suit of armor, complete with an aggressively large, geometric penis!!! That’s cinema, baby!!!