Justin Kurzel’s take on the Bard’s brutal, machination-filled Scottish play, Macbeth, is shaping up to be one of the must-see films of this coming winter. It’s certainly a wintry-looking proposition, with two new clips revealing a little more of the bleak aesthetic the Australian filmmaker is bringing to his adaptation.
This first shows, briefly, Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) in his early role as one of King Duncan’s generals. The battle, shot like a dream sequence, unfolds slowly with Fassbender to the fore, screaming like a banshee.
If the slow-motion, square-on shot of the two armies coming together offers an impressive sense of scale and violence, the second clip is a more subdued affair. Macbeth’s coronation comes at the end of some high-grade scheming from the nobleman and his wife, Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard), that will bring only ruin upon them.
On the basis of these snippets and Kurzel’s bleak Snowtown, it’s easy to see how the Aussie was deemed a good fit for the material. His research brief involved discovering what was that time like and how brutal it was. “It reminded me a lot of a Western,” he expands in the press notes, "and of a landscape and atmosphere that felt much more dangerous than I’d ever seen before from adaptations of Macbeth”.
Macbeth arrives in UK cinemas on October 2 with Paddy Considine, David Thewlis, Sean Harris, Jack Reynor and The Great Gatsby’s Elizabeth Debicki in train.