Review of Gothic (1987) by Andy F — 23 Oct 2013

The (many) people who hate this film almost unanimously misunderstand it. With Ken Russell, a truly rounded biography doesn't simply narrate events from a subject's life, but tells their story the way they themselves might have told it.

On its release, many critics expressed disgust at the film's visuals and criticized Russell for portraying Byron, Polidori, and the Shelleys as little more than drug-addled degenerates...ignoring the fact that if they had been contemporary figures, that is exactly how they would've been perceived by the establishment (and it IS how they were perceived by the establishment in their own time).

The dialogue and performances are laughably over-the-top, and the sometimes repulsive, always intense visuals are characteristic of the Russell style, but these extravagances suit the subject perfectly.

Many of Ken Russell's films could be considered terrible by any reasonable standard, but one mustn't judge Russell's work by any reasonable standard. Specifically, this film tells the story of the birth of not only Mary Shelley's Frankenstein but also John Polidori's The Vampyre.

Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) hosts a party at the infamous Villa Diodati for his friend (and rainy-day lover) Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), who brings his fiancée Mary (Natasha Richardson) and her stepsister Clair Clairmont (Miriam Cyr).

Also on hand is Dr Polidori (Timothy Spall), to administer the laudanum and glare jealously at Byron and Shelley from the shadows. The group drink laudanum till they hallucinate, they read from the Fantasmagoriana, they play games, they have orgies, and they hold a seance.

The seance is where the trouble begins, but Russell argues that without these self-inflicted tortures we would not today be talking about Frankenstein, and the world of letters would be a little less interesting.

There's also a great deal of subtext about the changing of the guard from the classical world to the modern world (these people were groundbreaking thinkers as well as artists). Not for everyone (no Russell film is), but if you're game and don't mind a whole lot of excess for its own sake (as this film's subjects surely did), give Gothic a spin!