Reseñas de la crítica

To focus solely on Lady Macbeth’s engagement with conventional feminist themes is to ignore the film’s greater depths. . . . Inspired by archival material documenting the lives of Black families in mid-19th century England, Oldroyd and his team fashioned a period piece that is a corrective to the whitewashing of British history and the national imaginary.

At 89 minutes, it is murderous potboiler material stripped bare—too bare, I think, because it ends up lapsing into vagueness. To address just one fundamental question, as Katherine enters an affair with the estate's groomsman (bodices will be ripped), is she experiencing true romantic passion or just exercising her god-given right to casual sex? Or is an inability to distinguish the two part of the whole point? That the answer seems to shift scene by scene indicates a lack of narrative firmness.

Like The Beguiled, Lady Macbeth is about power and the performed innocence of white womanhood. But in enriching its drama with race, Oldroyd's film demonstrates just how much Coppola's missed out on in contorting itself in its attempts to make gender dynamics its only axis.

This film may be directed by a man (it is the British theater director's debut film feature) but Alice Birch is the screenwriter, and this is one production that's all about authorial intent... Patriarchy creates unlikable women, and then it brutalizes them for fulfilling that fate. "Lady Macbeth" calls our bluff by daring us to find anything likeable in such a powerful anti-heroine. That I cannot only means the film has done its job.

Scene for increasingly horrifying scene, Lady Macbeth is about the making of a psychopath for whom bullying and betrayal have become learned behavior. The spotlight remains without sentimentality on Katherine and on the falling dominoes of violence that attend her efforts to sustain ownership of her illicit passion.

Like the novella, the movie opens up some interpretive leeway as it invites your sympathy for Katherine. She's an unambiguous captive, trapped by sex and class, yet the viciousness that her liberation awakens — as carnal lust slips into bloodlust — precludes a facile redemptive reading. Mr. Oldroyd boxes Katherine in his attractive visuals, imprisoning her as her male relatives do. Yet his intellectual distance also turns her into a specimen, a pinned butterfly turned taxidermy beast.

A "feminist" film need not portray all its female characters in a positive light. Women aren't a monolith of benevolence. Still, a film with multiple female characters who are equal parts sympathetic and sadistic, who face off against one another in a battle of wits and will, exposing some harsh truths about race, class, and privilege, is something rare — something to be tightly embraced. Lady Macbeth — a chilling period piece about a woman who comes into her own savage power — is that film.

The film avoids the Lawrentian ring of her sexual escapades, and part of its appeal lies in Katherine's laying waste to the pretenses of respectability as a 21st-century adolescent might. But Katherine feels disorientingly more modern than anyone around her, and the cold-blooded finale feels less like a true reckoning with moral character than the filmmakers seem to intend.

[Katherine's] daily routines of waking up and bathing are rendered with such ferocity—the soundtrack amplifies every brushstroke as though shredding through knots in Katherine's hair—that the film's eventual escalation into physical violence and murder seems a natural progression.

Not unlike a 1940s glamour performance the camera favors [Katherine] and her face, but Pugh keeps the turmoil, anger, fear and ultimate insanity hidden beneath the surface. There is no shaking, no twitching, no head clutching. There are some cracks in the surface of her fascinating face but they are subtle. (Actually I believe Pugh's performance is precisely built on hiding these signs of mental instability – she plays a woman who is acting all the time, hiding her madness.)

Brisk and sure-footed, Lady Macbeth outclasses many of its peers in British period cinema, not because of its bold use of sex and violence, but because of its dramatic intelligence and its skill at filleting contemporary relevance from a classic literary source.

The novella is a relentlessly miserablist parade of abuse, adultery, and homicide, but the changes that Oldroyd and screenwriter Alice Birch have made to its plotline all but ensure that their Lady Macbeth is also essentially sexist. Leskov's Shakespeare-inspired antiheroine—a wife who plans and carries out multiple murders—is transformed from a character driven by desperation into one who's seemingly animated by an innate wickedness.