Macbeth

 MACBETH

Director : Justin Kurzel

Year : 2015

Genre : Drama

Rating : ****

 

You will find no floating daggers, ghostly apparitions or witches brewing potions in Justin Kurzel's mist-strewn 'Macbeth', the latest cinematic adaption of William Shakespeare's blood-drenched tragedy. Starring the mercurial Michael Fassbender as Scotland's most infamous monarch, Kurzel's bold 're-imagining' of the Scottish play certainly takes artistic liberties with the Bard's hallowed writings - negating any of the more supernatural elements of the tale for more mundane and believable alternatives and the result is a remarkably evocative and visually stunning epic that may lack the grime and dirt of previous adaptations but more than makes up for it with staggeringly beautiful cinematography courtesy of Adam Arkapaw and brutal and bloody post-'Braveheart' scenes of battle. It is a tale of old told with the most modern of filmmaking techniques and Kurzel manages to find perverse, almost operatic beauty in Shakespeare's relentlessly archaic saga - with unshaven throats being violently slashed open and limbs being hacked off in breathtaking slow-motion and almost voyeuristic close up. Fassbender is at times frighteningly good as the bloodthirsty usurper whose unquenchable lust for power eventually leads to murderous ambition while Marion Cotilliard is surprisingly subdued yet nonetheless brilliant as a Lady Macbeth who no longer serves as the catalyst for homicide but rather as the pathetic onlooker whose pleading words of mercy ultimately fall on deaf ears. A 'Macbeth' for the 21st century audience.