Australian director Justin Kurzel butchered Macbeth.

Such a statement would cause uproar, should I leave it unexamined, but were I to expand upon my review of the recent cinematic adaptation, you might forgive my choice of descriptor.

Australian director Justin Kurzel did slash the playtext script to add an immediacy of physical action to his re-envisioning of the tragedy, and in this concentration of dialogue, what was screened was nothing short of viscerally beautiful cinematography. Hacking away the dross, cartilage and unnecessary connective tissue of the rhetoric, Kurzel presented the best bits of the Scottish play, hand-tied with heavy cinematic accents of Spielberg’s World War II epic Saving Private Ryan (1998), Snyder’s graphic novel inspired 300 (2006), the indomitable Gaelic spirit of Gibson’s Braveheart (1995) and no small acknowledgement to the aesthetic auteurship of Akira Kurosawa. This 2015 Macbeth is one of the closest, modern Shakespeare adaptations that relates to the Hitchcockian notion of pure cinema. Cinematography paired with vivid colour associations enabled audience identification of the good and evil binary present throughout the adaptation, and where the desaturated hues of the drear Scottish landscape provided little more than the environmental placement of a narrative set amidst and shaped by rugged, unforgiving terrain, acoustic diegetics translated the unspoken narrative with a fluency that defied the necessity for playtext dialogue.

Kurzel’s adaptation showed no compunctions to rearrange the placement of dialogue to enhance the narrative potency, a trait commonly shared with the directing greats of Olivier, Branagh and Polanski. Equally potent are the extra-narrative sequences which bring to startling light the gore and grime of life lived amidst the battles for supremacy of twelfth century Scotland: nothing is clean in Kurzel’s highlands, as Fassbender’s blackened fingernails and Cotillard’s stained skirts demonstrate. There is, in this, a startling contrast between realism and expressionism within the action of the film: where the plush velvet robes and well-lit courtrooms of previous, Tudor-inspired adaptations are replaced by the dimly lit, greyscale historicism of a medieval kingdom still fighting to claim mastery over the wilds of their homeland, heavily edited scenes such as the bullet-time slow motion battle-sequences immerses the audience in the mortal physicality through editing-suite performances.

Fassbender, not yet synonymous with the fantasy-action genre of cinema (despite his universal recognition as the youthful Magneto in the X-Men franchise), gave an emotive interpretation to the murderous Scottish Thane as a man caught in an emotional void after the death of his son. Thus, the bloody determination which expands into an tumultuous cyclone of tragedy is explained not as the uncontrollable destruction of an overly ambitious, fallible man, but the means of grounding and of self-identification after the removal of his familial future. Where the future is uncertain for the continuation of his line, Fassbender’s Macbeth regains some control over his fate through the only means at his command: the bloody action of warlike ascension to power and absolute control.

Where Fassbender’s Macbeth staggers through the adaptation, battle-hardened and hollow eyed at the loss of his son and subsequent sorrow at the death of his comrades, Cotillard as Lady Macbeth delivered a striking performance as a woman filled to the brim with passion, driven by desire for the protection of fulfilled ambition for her family. As the perfect foil for her onscreen husband, she too warped her character beyond the two-dimensional villainess punished for her pride to a grieving mother vainly projecting her hopes and griefs to providing the future for her husband which was snatched from them in the death of their son. For a character whose spoken presence onstage is already diminished by the removal of tracts of the sourcetext rhetoric, Cotillard’s future queen is made unquestionably human: her strength of character is made undeniably richer through the presentation of her suicide as a choice made by a mind seeking the quietude of death having failed to provide the future she so desperately pinned her hopes upon.

With a heavily edited script, Kurzel told the dynamics of the Scottish play through a panoply of visual assaults: opening and closing the film immersed in battle, the audience was never left in any doubt that this blood-soaked, emotionally warped, visceral interpretation of a war film was one of the best cinematically-placed genres for the interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies.

Macbeth (2015) is still being screened in cinemas across the country.