Taking a considerable aesthetic departure from his previous works, Yorgos Lanthimos transforms the screen into the site of an art installation—and if this time he seems to rely more on the visuals than the contents, it is to a no less piercing ultimate result.
Although the relentless zooming in and out got me a little woozy, other bold stylistic choices such as fisheyes and the combination of colour and b/w, did feel convincing and perfectly synergistic to the narrative—all the more as shot on vibrant Kodak stock.
Echoing scattered if vivid traits of the architecture of Mackintosh, Gaudí, Horta, as well as reminding me the romantic surrealism of Tim Walker’s fashion stories, production designers Shona Heath and James Price put together a colourful theatre of contaminations that never feels dull or inconsistent—and provide the perfect sound box to Jerskin Fendrix’s fantastic score.
Whilst I particularly loved the dancing skills of Mark Ruffalo and everything Kathryn Hunter did, and does in general as an actor, it is indeed Emma Stone’s Bella the true driving force of the film—the baffling purity of her logics, her straightforward attitude to life, her roaming without intent, but a clumsy yet somehow extremely elegant and seductive gait, through a world that feels much stranger than the freakish past that created her.
