Anti-heroine rebels against men’s shackles
“Are you cold?” the husband queries his new young bride on their wedding night.
She assures him that she’s “thick-skinned” — an understated self-description from the preternaturally plucky Katherine (Florence Pugh), whose youthful, innocent-seeming visage conceals her rapacious drive to survive and live on her own terms.
In “Lady Macbeth,” directed by William Oldroyd and written by Alice Birch, the story of Katherine becomes a cautionary tale of corrosive patriarchy. The film, adapted from the Nikolai Leskov novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” is a haunting, angry vision of feminine rebellion anchored by a powerful lead performance from Pugh.
It’s 1865 in rural England and Katherine is married off to a cruel, neglectful man, Alexander (Paul Hilton), who runs his estate with his equally cruel father, Boris (Christopher Fairbank). Katherine likes the outdoors, but in marriage, she becomes a caged bird, laced tightly into corsets and hoop skirts, confined inside a stuffy house filled with men. Marriage is such a stultifying bore she can’t even stay awake.
“She gets restless if she’s tied up too long,” stableman Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis) mentions to Anna (Naomie Ackie), Katherine’s longsuffering handmaid. He’s referring to the estate’s hound, but he could also be speaking in code about the lady of the manor, who throws off her shackles when husband and father-in-law are away, taking herself for long, windy walks on the moors, and taking Sebastian as a lover. She savors every lusty moment, which could only ever be temporary, in a society where she’s considered the property of her husband and father-in-law.
Katherine rebels against this impossible, abusive system with her laughter, her lust, her unwillingness to take these men seriously or be cowed into submission. She gleefully upends the power dynamic, but men of the house keep popping up, and she becomes
locked into an increasingly high-stakes spiral. Under pressure, she hardens into something harder, sharper and much more sinister.
Oldroyd shoots “Lady Macbeth” with a rigid and controlled style. The camera stays rooted in place, cutting into scenes in the middle, snatching private moments. The lack of movement indoors mirrors the confinement of her situation in this space. The film wisely never over-explains itself, but there are a few crucial moments that seem to be missing some connective tissue, plot points that we have to suss out after the fact. As a viewer, you feel a step or two behind the steel trap of Katherine’s mind.
“Lady Macbeth” may be a period piece but feels startlingly modern, and the film offers the opportunity for contemporary extrapolations, based not just around gender but also race, thanks to the color-blind casting. People of color play not just servants but social equals to Katherine and her husband. The result of this casting is manifold; we judge the poor treatment of servants through the additional lens of racism while marveling at Agnes (Golda Rosheuvel), an associate of Alexander’s and a black woman who is the only person who can go toe to toe with Katherine, never subservient.
“Lady Macbeth” strikes a chord that’s simultaneously ferociously feminist and genuinely chilling. Anchored by the wide-ranging, utterly riveting powerhouse performance from Pugh, Katherine evolves into an indelible cinematic anti-heroine. While condemning her actions, you can’t help but root for her because we understand her origin story all too well.