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"What's done cannot be undone", Lady Macbeth interpreted over the years by Francesca Annis, Judi Dench and Jeanette Nolan, but Marion Cotillard is the latest of the blood-drenched consorts playing opposite Michael Fassbender in a new film adaptation directed by Justin Kurzel. The tragedy unfolds in astrikingly bleak Caledonian landscape as the king and his entourage lodge overnight with the thane of Glamis and Cawdor and his elegant wife. While the monarch sleeps, Lady Macbeth stiffens her husband's resolve to slaughter him. Landscapes employ the stunning effect in this version, blasted heath, wide, watery skies, castles on desolate shores. But the natural drama is often ramped up with starlight's colour washed over the images riven in blocks of red. There's some editing of the text, no jokey portrait at the gate, for example, and crucially a change of pace - the Macbeths decide early on to kill the king. Director Justin Kurzel, whose previous films include Snowtown, a grimly compelling study of a serial killer, explained to me the reasons behind the Macbeths' haste to murder. "The screenplay I just read like a western. The way it was written, it felt much more like he was affected by his job and what it was to be a kind of soldier of those times. And we also brought to the fore, the possibility of a child and the two of them kind of dealing with the grief of that. That then provided a really interesting platform in which the ambition to come out of. Was it about kind of greed and power, intents for killing the king, or was it about two characters desperately trying to save themselves from each other and themselves?" | 
