1986’s Gothic is an exploration of what could have transpired over the course of the first night Percy and Mary Shelley spent with Lord Byron in Geneva in 1816.  It was during that summer Mary formed the idea for what would become her novel Frankenstein.  Another guest at the mansion is Doctor Polidori, Byron’s alleged physician, who conceived the short story “The Vampyre” during that same period.

Only five actors are on the screen at any given moment for the vast majority of the runtime.  Gabriel Byrne is Lord Byron, in an excessively lecherous and leering performance.  I’m not sure why, but I have yet to find a movie where I found a performance of his to be completely believable.  Conversely, Julian Sands is technically not as good of an actor, but I believed his over-the-top mugging as Percy Shelley, essentially a ridiculously exuberant man-child.  Natasha Richardson fares the best of the cast as Mary Shelley, who doesn’t know what to think of the ensuing decadence, despite repeatedly expressing her belief in free love.  Her performance is all the more impressive for this being her feature film debut.  The perpetually bug-eyed Myriam Cyr plays Mary’s half-sister, who is so raw and feral in her sexuality that she could be described as rabid.  Rounding out the cast is Timothy Spall, who I have only previously seen as much older and in more respectable roles.  Which made it all the stranger to see him as a flamingly gay masochist with a shaved head who keeps trying to kill himself by drinking acid.

You may already be getting the impression this a strange film, and that would be an understatement.  I’ll just cut to the chase and reveal it was helmed by Ken Russell, so you’ll have a rough idea what to expect if you’ve seen such films of his as The Devils, Tommy or Lair of the White Worm.  If anything, it is closest in style to that last of those, with an undead knight wearing a suit of armor with an enormous bulge in the crotch that seems to conceal a rhino horn.  It’s not unlike the terrifying faux-phallus Amanda Donohoe dons in that picture.

Almost everything that transpires is framed as being hallucinations induced by consuming laudanum, which the characters consume like it literally was water.  Richardson has a vision while sprawled on a bed, that a demon is crouched on her chest ala Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare.  A tree struck by lightning casts a shadow on a ceiling like a wraith with waving arms.  There’s a tray of rice with leeches wriggling through, beating The Lost Boys to the punch with its similar scene a year later.  Perhaps the most notorious moment finds Sands looking at Cyr’s bare chest and her nipples proceed to open, revealing human eyes within.

Then there are elements which may or may not be hallucinatory, though they aren’t something that really could have occurred.  One is a life-size clockwork automaton that does an elaborate striptease.  Given Russell was not a stickler for historical accuracy in his period films, I’m on the fence as to whether or not it was supposed to be real.  And, oh yes, I almost forgot: I don’t care.

I’ll concede that what I perceived to be the premise is a novel one; chiefly, what type of mayhem went on during that summer that so inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece?  In the script’s best lines, Sands sums up the situation like this: “It’s alive!  Don’t you understand?  We’ve given life to a creature, a creation, a jigsaw of all our worst fears, in flesh and blood.”  But we never see a creature, exactly.  It just leaves behind ectoplasm everywhere, which left me to believe the house had been invaded by Slimer from Ghostbusters.

I feel compelled to single out Thomas Dolby’s score as it is largely terrible.  The music for a film does not need to be listenable outside of the work it was created to accompany, but what is here is largely discordant to the point of distraction.  If there’s one thing a soundtrack shouldn’t do, it is to draw attention to itself to the extent one’s attention is diverted from the visuals.

As for those visuals, I can understand why critics of the time lamented the influence of music videos creeping into feature films.  Almost every frame looks like a new wave video of that time, and I do not mean that as a compliment.  One bit made me laugh out loud, when French doors burst open, blinding Richardson with white light and organic debris, in a moment that recalls nothing but the video for “Total Eclipse of the Heart”.

Russell’s films are an acquired taste, and I’ll confess it is a taste I do not wish to acquire.  Some of his oeuvre is more interesting than the rest, but I found little to recommend in Gothic.  It tries too hard to be shocking, yet fails to genuinely startle.  It so desperately wants to be regarded as brainy, though it didn’t strike me as very smart.  I felt more like the genteel people at the start of the film, who are observing the Byron estate through telescopes from a distance.  I also watched with a detached amusement and then went on with my life as if nothing had happened.

Dir: Ken Russell

Starring Gabriel Bryne, Julian Sands, Miranda Richardson, Myriam Cyr, Timothy Spall

Watched on Vestron blu-ray