Critics reviews

Its point is not strictly to induce shudders, nor to pay homage, but to relate a romance of utmost tenderness. Its Möbius strip structure doesn't point toward nihilistic gloom; counterintuitively, it demonstrates how relationships (kinky lesbian relationships especially) can break and mend. Strickland musters all the opulently sinister excesses at his disposal for the sake of vulnerability and sexual candor.

What we're watching isn't so much a film about unusual sexual practices as it is one about the way all relationships mutate, about how a person we imagine to be one way can become, over the course of time, someone different. That's not an original idea, by any means. But, not unlike the old movies it appropriates, The Duke of Burgundy reinvents that idea to the point where it feels like a revelation.

This entomological counter-story is merely a detour that allows Strickland to point to a subject that he never tackles openly—only addressing it from a safe comfort-zone. He generates an arty respectability denied to the sexploitation flicks constituting one of his principal reference points—films that, at least, were honest enough to deal with sex and eroticism without avoiding their depiction.

While the film's setting is deliberately left geographically and chronologically indistinct, the richly-toned colour palette, mannered acting and baroque decors of The Duke of Burgundy unambiguously render it a loving homage to a certain highly stylised vein of 1970s European erotic art cinema.

Dialogue happens rarely in the film, but it suits to ground the audience while they parse Cynthia and Evelyn's emotional universe. This vertical and horizontal friction has moments of breaking in The Duke Of Burgundy, but even at the film's conclusion, Cynthia and Evelyn's fates are the agency of the audience's affecting interpretation.

It's a film with its mysteries – including a remarkable hallucination that overdoses on moth imagery (and a soundscape of chittering insect noises) – but nevertheless it's extraordinarily lucid and deliciously entertaining.

Love can be a cruel mistress, as British director Peter Strickland so exquisitely illuminates in this startlingly beautiful piece of Euro erotica. The shifting nature of long-term relationships is explored through a couple with a fetish for butterflies and S&M and it's a sumptuous, spellbinding, sensory experience.

The kinky cinematic escapade you should see on Valentine's Day is British filmmaker Peter Strickland's wildly elusive The Duke of Burgundy, a beguiling and gorgeously shot love story between two women set in a forested alternate universe where men don't exist. It feels transported directly from the projection booth of a broken-down 1970s art-house cinema.

The undeniable otherness of the chosen subject matter — dominant-submissive role-playing in a lesbian relationship — insures that Strickland (a straight white man, it bears mentioning) is never running on representational autopilot, and accordingly, the vagaries of The Duke of Burgundy's form are always in lock step with the psychological dynamics of Cynthia and Evelyn's relationship.

Fissures in the couple's relationship appear as Evelyn's demands for scheduled abuse grow increasingly stringent, raising the suspense effectively, if belatedly. Portentous images of insects both living and preserved are as heavy-handed as the erotic psychology is flimsy; the movie is as sexy as a chess game and as insightful as a catalogue. One line of dialogue enters the anthology of howlers: "Had I ordered a human toilet, none of this would have happened.

Why am I not crazier about the film? It certainly is, at least, a mildly seductive exercise in sound and vision; but while the visuals are always arresting, they are rarely entirely compelling. As much admiration as I had for Strickland's vision (ably captured by cinematographer Nicholas D. Knowland), there was also something about it that struck me as rather fussy.

What begins as a bloodless tale of mistress and maid blossoms into a poignant, cyclical exploration of a couple's inability to compromise on sexual predilections. Best experienced with an uninitiated pair of eyes, The Duke of Burgundy is an increasingly rare film that, for all its reflexive homages and aural intricacies, never forgoes substance for style.