Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Day in and day out, lovers Cynthia and Evelyn enact an elaborate sadomasochistic fantasy as mistress and maid. But as their ritual of domination and submission begins to turn stale, Cynthia yearns for something more conventional, while Evelyn tries to push their taboos even further.
Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy is a genuinely singular piece of cinema — a lush, dreamlike erotic drama that evokes 70s European art-house erotica (Jess Franco, Walerian Borowczyk) while remaining unmistakably its own creation. Cinematography by Ari Wegner is ravishing, bathing the film in amber, velvet textures, moth-wing patterns, and a pervasive autumnal melancholy. The novelty is exceptional: an all-female world obsessed with lepidopterology and sadomasochistic ritual, treated with deadpan wit and genuine emotional weight. Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara D'Anna deliver deeply committed performances, conveying the exhausting asymmetry of desire within the relationship with great nuance. The plot, while deliberately repetitive and cyclical by design, is deliberately thin — its power comes from texture and mood rather than narrative momentum, which slightly limits its dramatic range. The ending, while tonally consistent and quietly affecting, doesn't fully resolve the emotional tension it builds, leaving things at a somewhat muted, if poetic, close.