★★★★☆

ALTHOUGH the title of this attention-grabbing British period drama shares its name with one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters, it actually has nothing to do with the work of the Bard. Instead this is an absorbing, provocative and accomplished adaptation of the 1865 novel Lady Macbeth Of The Mtsensk District by Russian author Nikolai Leskov.

Its story centres on Katherine (Florence Pugh), a young woman in early 19th-century England who is sold into marriage to a middle-aged man, Alexander (Paul Hilton), whom she hates, and into a financially privileged but lonely life that bores her stiff. She is told to stay inside with her prayer book and to perform her wifely duties.

There’s an undeniable feminist core to this unforgettable period tale, as Katherine begins to take control of a suffocating life that she never chose and which binds her tighter to the gender hierarchy of the time, desperately railing against it by starting an illicit affair with handsome farmhand Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis).

Though never preachy with it, the film comments on female oppression, male dominance (in the home and society at large), prejudice and race (she looks down on her dutiful black maid Anna), class and gender behavioural norms and the limits of morality within the familiar shell of Victorian melodrama.

At the very heart of why this strikingly austere and disquieting film – evocative of everything from the work of Michael Haneke to Andrea Arnold’s uncompromising 2011 version of Wuthering Heights – is the performance of Pugh in the lead role. She is utterly spellbinding throughout, often saying a lot without saying much at all, throwing loaded glances and wry smiles separated by outbursts of protestation as she morphs from a meek mouse-like feminine figure into a cunning, near-psychotic force to be reckoned with.

It’s a fascinating transformation to behold, told over the course of a film that comfortably and confidently juggles its challenging themes and constantly dips its toe into many waters. It sets up expectations with its title and period drama formalism before wildly contorting into psychodrama, eroticism and even a hint of horror, as it tonally slides an icy hand up your back and around your neck.

The staid formality and tight structure of the theatre is very much evident in this double-header feature film debut from playwright Alice Birch and director William Oldroyd. But it’s married magnificently with a palpable, unmistakable cinematic quality awash with gorgeous yet bleak vistas outside the secluded countryside manor and claustrophobic rooms within, where things are always bubbling away under the surface, ready to violently explode at any moment.