Ken Russell's Gothic: A Review
Horror with Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron, Natasha Richardson,
A review of Ken Russell's 1986 classic 'Gothic' depicting the infamous night in which literary history was made.
Overview
On a stormy evening, in an exquisite villa by a Swiss lake, literary history was made. It was a night of ghost stories conducted by the infamous English poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley along with Dr. William Polidori and Mary Shelley. Two famous novels were dreamt up - Frankenstein and The Vampire, and neither of them by Shelley or Byron.
Ken Russell’s fictional depiction of that night, Gothic (1986), is a truly mad-cap rendering steeped in all manner of vulgar eccentricity. The casting is also very good - Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron is as close to perfect casting as possible and Natasha Richardson as Mary Shelley puts in a strong performance.
The Film's Plot
The story, what little there is of one, concerns Lord Byron and his guests summoning a demon that stalks them, driving them into frenzied hallucinatory madness before they fight back and break the magical spell they appear to be under.
The lack of coherent story is one of the film’s strongest assets as it allows Ken Russell to conjure a truly nightmarish visual experience that offers some wonderfully strange moments to occur. Stephen Volk’s screenplay is loaded with subtle references to the actual lives of the writers - Mary’s anxiety dreams about her dead children and premonition of Percey Shelley’s drowning is brilliantly imagined by Ken Russell’s assured direction.
The Style
Although the film is a worthy addition to the corpus of Russell’s film work, it has not aged well and reeks of the worst excesses of the 1980s - including Thomas Dolby’s cheesy rock and synthesiser musical score. The main offender, however, is Julian Sands. It is his OTT performance as England’s greatest poet Percy Bysshe Shelley that derails much of the interest and scenes - his acting is so absurdly theatrical that is comes across as grossly amateurish.
Russell also finds time to re-imagine and acknowledge many traits found in gothic literature and painting, the most famous being, Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare, in which a demon sits on the chest of a dreaming woman.
Summary
Viewers wishing for a more generic horror film will be very disappointed by what Gothic has to offer. Viewers wanting a phantasmagoria of sex and art will be transfixed by the film - despite its inherent weaknesses.
