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'Lady Macbeth' Is a Period Drama About White Women's Rage

Forget what you know about costume dramas—this is a radical reinvention of the genre. Lead actors Florence Pugh and Naomi Ackie explain what makes the incendiary film so unique.
Katherine (played by Florence Pugh) in "Lady Macbeth."

Lady Macbeth is a period film replacing the gilded opulence and niceties of noble courtship for louche drunkness, violence, and nude, sun-dappled daytime sex scenes. Its protagonist Katherine is less plucky débutante, more caged chattel seeking a taste of pleasure and freedom at any cost. Played by Florence Pugh ("I genuinely do have one of those faces that can go from the happiest thing in the world to 'Oh god, she's a demon,'" she tells Broadly), Katherine is a three-dimensional and detestable female character with enough violent agency to procure what she wants—even if it's just for a brief spell.

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Screenwriter Alice Birch adapted Nikolai Leskov's 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District, relocating its austere Victoriana to a large, draughty house in Northumberland, northern England. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is a favourite of Birch's, and director William Oldroyd conjures an identical landscape with wide-angle shots of the forests and moors that Katherine longs to roam.

As the film begins, our Lady Macbeth is trapped within the house of Mr Lester, her mean, drunk, and impotent industrialist husband. There is nothing to entertain this teenager, save a prayer book, the creaking of bare floorboards, and tingles of faintness brought on by her stifling corset. The house's one concession to opulence is a plush and enveloping velvet chaise lounge; a cold blue womb where Katherine is doomed to sit out her days until she provides her husband with an heir.

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One misty day, Katherine manages to leave the house unsupervised and meets her husband's farmhand Sebastian. It doesn't matter that he is humiliating and perhaps sexually assaulting her maid, Anna. Katherine is in love.

"Between Sebastian and Katherine, it is obvious her love is more than his," Pugh says. "But she also attaches her excuse for freedom on him." In one passionate scene, Katherine both promises and threatens Sebastian with the hyperbolic intensity of a Phil Spector lyric: "I'd rather stop you breathing than have you doubt how I feel."

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Katherine's maid, Anna, played by Naomi Ackie.

Yet she grows to torture him, making him clean up all the messes Anna can't attend to: "[Katherine] uses him without knowing it," Pugh explains. "She's not intelligent enough to go, 'If I have him, we can go and kill some people', but she sees happiness and fun and life with him and consequently, will throw him under the bus to keep herself alive."

Pugh thinks it makes sense that Katherine is attracted to a man she first encounters hurting another woman: "Katherine sees Anna being abused as a weird form of affection, because she has never been spoken to or touched. I think she's attracted to the fact that Anna has the attention."

Naomi Ackie, who plays Anna, is perhaps more damning. "Katherine knew a lot of things she was absolutely cool with when it comes to Anna," she says. "There's just a lack of caring. It does depend on what you think happens between Anna and Sebastian; I'm still not sure to this day."

As the Guardian points out, Lady Macbeth is also notable for subverting period drama's "whites-only rule": Sebastian is played by mixed-race actor Cosmo Jarvis, and Naomi Ackie is black. Oldroyd and casting director Shaheen Baig held colorblind auditions, but pointed to research that proves that significant numbers of black people lived in the northeast during the 19th century. "That area of England was far more diverse than we have been led to believe," he told the Guardian. "A lot of people make assumptions, and those assumptions are usually based on films they've seen already."

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Pugh notes "the most interesting" relationship in the film lies between Katherine and Anna: "It is obviously under the orders of the men, but Anna is the one tying Katherine into her clothes, watching her and keeping her in this house, then preparing her for sex. Katherine sees this as a betrayal. This is where her hatred comes from, and she puts Anna through hell because of it." This means condemning Anna to a terrifying fate after she can't—and won't—play along with Katherine's violence.

A later plot development—and the introduction of more black characters in the film's tense third act—implies that Mr Lester is exclusively attracted to black women, suggesting that Katherine has reason to be doubly jealous of Anna. It also, adds Ackie, "highlights the idea of feminism and intersectionality." Lady Macbeth isn't just about a woman subject to intense, patriarchal control—it is also about a white woman who feels entitled to wreak havoc in her attempt to rebel.

Her priorities are a lot smaller: to day by day, just be alive.

"Katherine feels that she has the right to run rampant and make all the choices she makes doing whatever she wants, and Anna can't really do that much," Ackie says. "She doesn't have as many options and her priorities are a lot smaller: to day by day, just be alive."

While Katherine turns the volume up on her rage—with increasingly violent consequences—Anna becomes quieter and eventually falls silent for the rest of the film. "I played that as a decision," says Ackie. "It's like Katherine's said, 'This is my status, you either keep your mouth shut or you're going in the same direction as whoever I've dealt with last.'"

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As for Sebastian, the audience is both encouraged to objectify his muscular frame and pity him when he must sleep among animals in the barn. But Katherine's first sexual encounter with Sebastian is troubling; he takes her "no" as encouragement. Pugh said this "tricky" scene was carefully shot: "Katherine's sheer panic is the fact that she isn't in control when he first comes in. But she takes his trousers down; she makes the first step towards actually having sex."

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The next sex scene is far more explicit: Katherine thoroughly enjoys fucking Sebastian, and she subsequently destroys anybody who suspects this infidelity or stands in her way. There are multiple death scenes, some left to the imagination, others placed in the foreground of the shot. In a one-take death scene, Katherine even kills a child.

"Anton [Palmer who plays the child] was seven, so we couldn't let on that I was strangling him, and we couldn't get him to play dead, as he'd just pull a silly dead face," Pugh says. Oldroyd turned it into a game, instructing the child actor to kick his legs, scream, and squirm at the right moment. "I was terrified because I was in control of not suffocating this kid and keeping him calm," she adds.

Lady Macbeth is a radical story, and though Pugh says viewers are most frequently shocked by how quickly she "turns", her passionate fury is almost relatable. Unlike her domestic cage, Katherine's violence has no structure. Bereft of goals, she is a teenager grasping onto whatever hoist she can find, clambering towards whatever looks or feels like freedom. She cares about others, but tightly cocoons and subsequently crushes those who love her the most. But eventually, says Pugh: "What's so heartbreaking about the ending is she's done everything in her might to get what she wants and what she was always supposed to have: just a bit of freedom. But actually, as a result, everything has gone."

Lady Macbeth is out now in the UK. It opens in the US on July 14.