Film
Gothic
- Director
- Ken Russell
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 89 mins
June 16, 1816. In a villa on the Lake Geneva shoreline (no, it’s not the Deep Purple song), Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) and his biographer-physician John Polidori (Timothy Spall) are playing host to Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), his fiancé Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson) and her half-sister Claire (Myriam Cyr) during a gathering sotrm. Laudanum-fuelled misbehaviour ensues, followed by a seance… The late, great Ken Russell unleashes his full box of tricks in this fabulous romp fictionalising the events that led to the writing of Frankenstein. Eighties critics hated this on release, but then eighties critics were wrong about most things – especially the films of Ken Russell.
Gothic makes a welcome return to the big screen to launch the Watershed’s Frankenstein 200 June brunch season marking the 200th anniversary of publication of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece.
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