Blisteringly Nightmarish

Rating: 7/10 (1 December 2015)

Some say the movie with the Mother of all twists is The Sixth Sense (1999). Then the Father of them all must be William Shakespeare's Macbeth, written way way back in 1606. It didn't just have one monumental twist, it had three. This is my favorite cautionary tale of how the love for power can corrupt the most righteous person. The play has many visceral layers and each time I teach it in schools, I discover something frightfully new. As I plumped the depths of murky hell, I gratefully clawed back into the light. This is one of the world's best stories and I sometimes feel it is the blueprint for telling all great stories. But do we need yet another film adaptation? Do we need to wake Shakespeare up from his eternal rest for this? O for Goodnesse sake, quake thee absolute yea! (But there are some caveats. Later on that)
Australian director Justin Kurzel's vision for Macbeth is one of tone and mood. He has distilled the essence of Shakespeare's most enacted play in any form and translated onto the big screen with a huge soundscape and an implosion of monochromatic colours. If you want to know how a waking nightmare feels like this is it. Watching this feels like taking a stroll in hell. Every frame is carefully shot to illustrate a paean of pain and madness. Kurzel knows the story all would know, so narratively he is even handed and allowed the nightmarish tale to unfold itself. Under his unique vision there is no gloss, nothing and no one is romanticized, all the characters are distilled to a single motivation, an entity resigned to the supernatural forces at play. Everyone seems resigned to play out the game, no one wants to break out of their state. The theme of puppets and the puppeteers comes to the fore like a stab to the heart. I was glad the hellish journey to hell was over but I was utterly lost why I felt like I needed to stab something (I did stab something after that - a piece of chicken chop. Thankfully not the two idiotic PRC women sitting behind me).
The performances by Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard are frightfully spellbinding. Their soliloquies performed with venomous aplomb. Making us fall in love with Shakespeare's exquisite turns in phrases is not Kurzel's aim. He was more intent on making the madness real for us. Macbeth's despairing complaint about life: " ... it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" hits a spot in my heart I never thought existed, and Lady Macbeth's painful "Out, damn'd spot! Out, I say!" is poignant and as the shot pulls out we actually see who she is lamenting to. My heart broke.
Kurzel's Macbeth though blisteringly visceral and gut-twisting in its vision, doesn't say anything new or reward the faithful. It is an unwavering and outstanding adaptation, but unlike Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1953) and Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool (2007), it doesn't breathe new life into the tale. 30 minutes in you will already know what you will get: an unsentimental retelling of an old favorite. It does tweak a few scenes remarkably well like how the film opens and how its relevance is made so pronounced through Lady Macbeth's final soliloquy. I particularly also enjoyed the three witches scenes which play up the nightmare angle. Overall, the film is intense and depressing to a fault, unapologetically so. I am grateful for the moody experience but I wouldn't want to relive it. One visit to the murky depths of hell is enough to last a lifetime.