Gothic

Short review: if you want to watch a bunch of swingers and a gay monkey lose their minds on opium then you should watch this.  Long review: This was everything I wanted from a gothic tale and more. The female lead, the iconic Mary Shelley, is a gothic heroine who wanders around a huge, haunted mansion while wearing a long, white sleeping dresses, while the other female lead is a possessed bushy haired trollop who smears mud on her naked body and shrieks like a hyena. All the men are in love with each other and have a fight to the death about it. This film is very freaky. I LOVE when period dramas get freaky, and no one does freaky better than Ken Russel. I know some people call him crass with the imagery and choppy with the editing as if it was a bad thing, but those are things I love about his films. They are very unpredictable and a joy to watch. I also appreciate that the homoerotism escaped subtext and became literal text, since we all knew poets of that time were gay as fuck. The interpersonal conflicts going on were all so intense, and I gasped like a hapless maiden several times throughout this whole thing. This soundtrack has everything. Gregorian chants? You know it. Heavy 80s synth darkwave? Of course. It is really charming when you can tell when a time period film was made, and this one has 80s all over it.  Everything looks so beautiful. Lord Byron has a point, I too would go through the horrors every night if it meant I could live in that mansion. It isn’t just the set design that is stunning, but the composition and color grading as well. The way the light and shadows catches on the folds of the drapery almost made me cry.