Critic Reviews

The 1971 epic offers a stylish and scathing parable about the dangerous ways that the powerful can exploit religious zeal to stay that way.

There is much to irritate in the film, but it's bold, individual and a landmark in British cinema, with outstanding performances.

Russell’s penchant for aesthetic excess is thoroughly indulged, as the director stages grotesque human tableaus straight out of Hieronymus Bosch over Derek Jarman’s intricately detailed sets. The result gives the story a sort of wanton, overripe feel, with such ostensibly austere environments as a cloistered convent about to explode with repressed sensuality.

The funniest thing about this 1971 Ken Russell camp epic is probably the juxtaposition of its first-class production values (a good cast, great set design, marvelous photography) with Russell's no-class sexual fantasies—it's like a David Lean remake of Pink Flamingos.

It is like a lunatic opera, an attempt to make a furious poem out of frenzy. Russell's flamboyant theatricality and his interest in the perverse have been too much imposed on his other films; but here, style and subject are perfectly matched. The film does not work as drama. But as a glimpse of hell it is superbly, frighteningly effective.

No matter how thickly Russell piles on the masturbating nuns, tortured priests and dissolute dauphins, there's no getting round the fact that it's all more redolent of a camp revue than a cathartic vision. Derek Jarman's sets, however, still look terrific.

Whatever the moral perspective, it keeps you gripped right to the end.

As if the story alone weren’t bizarre enough, Russell has spared nothing in hyping the historic events by stressing the grisly at the expense of dramatic unity.

The set design, by future director Derek Jarman, is probably the most successful element of the film.

It's a see-through movie composed of a lot of clanking, silly, melodramatic effects that, like rib-tickling, exhaust you without providing particular pleasure, to say nothing of enlightenment.