So much can be said in silence — that’s one of the greatest privileges of film, and it’s a weapon “Lady Macbeth” wields well.
Prolonged silences and the intimacy of solitude: the trappings of a domestic life. These are what make up most of the scenery in this film, which only make Katherine’s (Florence Pugh, compelling as always) — and by extension, our — excursions into the outside all the more jarring, like being set free from suffocation.
This is a film told in silent, still, and steady cameras, as if challenging us, daring us to turn away from all the corseted, closeted domestic violence going on between its walls. Symmetrical frames also abound, many times evoking the feeling of a still-life painting come to life.
And so Katherine’s story unfolds, and by the time the plot’s dominoes begin to fall (this is a Shakespeare and Russian novella adaptation after all), all that tension practically threatens to spark off the screen: the echo of a too-strong slap, the final resounding blow of an unwarranted beating. The anger of repressed women is a live wire on a tightrope.
Violence can often be an invisible thing, and in the seclusion of the rural countryside, the absence of witnesses is the vacancy of truth. No body, no crime.
“She won’t speak”, a character says nonchalantly, about midway through the film. Mercy on those who believe such farce.
