Writer-director Anna Biller's new film, 'The Face of Horror,' premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in the Midnight Madness section. The 1-hour-59-minute feature reimagines the classic Japanese ghost story 'Yotsuya Kaidan' in 14th-century England, shot primarily in and around castles and churches in Prague on 35mm film.
The cast is led by Kristine Froseth as Eleanor, a vain but good-hearted young woman who lives with her father, sister and brother-in-law on a farm estate and pines for a knight while gazing into a golden mirror. Ellie Bamber plays her more practical sister, Beatrice. Their lives unravel after the unemployed, duplicitous knight Edward, played by Jonah Hauer-King, kills their father when he refuses to let Eleanor marry him. His friend Richard (Leo Suter) then kills Beatrice's husband, and the two men scheme to marry the sisters and seize their property, despite warnings that the marriages are cursed.
A year later, Eleanor is an exhausted new mother neglected by her husband, while Beatrice refuses to share Richard's bed unless he avenges her father's and husband's deaths — a task both men know is impossible, since there are no other killers to find. When Edward and Richard rescue a royal woman, Isabel (Bella Heathcote), who is unhappy in her marriage to an older man, Edward and Isabel begin plotting to be together, setting off further death and betrayal.
The film's cast also includes Ben Radcliffe, Perdita Weeks, Clare Calbraith, Edward Franklin, John Sackville and Steven Blake. Biller produced alongside Mike Goodridge and James Bowsher, with Phil Hunt, Compton Ross and Jared Sanford serving as executive producers. Sydney Oberfeld, Thelma Ttorfadóttir and James Cannon are associate producers, and Dylan Rees is co-producer. M. David Mullen served as cinematographer, Gabriel Andrés Gallegos composed the score, and Pavel Vojtíšek was production designer. Biller also served as costume designer and editor, with Des Hamilton and Georgia Topley handling casting.
According to a review of the film, Biller has said she drew inspiration from 'The Virgin Spring,' 'Ugetsu,' Kurosawa's 'Ran' and Visconti's 'The Innocent,' though the review argues the film doesn't reach their emotional depth and instead plays its feminist commentary in a way reminiscent of the canceled Comedy Central series 'Another Period' and Hulu's 'The Great.' The review praised Froseth, Bamber and Heathcote's performances but criticized Hauer-King and Suter's work as sarcastic and artificial. This marks Biller's return to feature filmmaking a decade after her 2016 film 'The Love Witch.' Froseth is also appearing this year in 'Her Private Hell.'
Photo: Secundus Zephyrus, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
