a review of 卢丹的恶魔

#76 (March 17/31) I watched this one on the strength of Dan McCoy's recommendation on a recent episode of The Flop House podcast. I've only seen a handful of other Ken Russell films, but I've basically liked everything I've seen. Going into it, I was expecting something a bit closer to the horror genre (being that the film was hosted on the Shudder streaming service) but instead came away with more of a surreal historical drama with an unsettling sense of anachronism mixed with real-world immediacy. Russell's 16th Century France seems almost like a weird and fantastic science-fiction setting a la Frank Herbert's "Dune", replete with twisted and decadent figures exercising power over one another. Although I had heard that the film was rather extreme in terms of violence and sexuality, the cut on Shudder (supposedly the most complete edit available) seemed a bit restrained; I wonder if there is a more extreme edit that is still out there somewhere, although I don't know how necessary it would be to tell the same story.