Dominik Moll will attend the screening
Vincent Cassel gets back to the roots of Gothic in Dominik Moll’s suitably torrid adaptation of the legendary novel about good, evil and dark desire.
In his first two features, Harry, He’s Here To Help and Lemming, writer-director Dominik Moll blended thriller tension with an outré sense of the surreal. In The Monk, he gets back to Surrealist roots with a vengeance. Matthew Lewis’s 1796 novel The Monk was one of the wellsprings of Gothic literature, and a key text for the Surrealists – in fact, Luis Buñuel co-scripted the version filmed in 1972 by Adonis Kyrou. This decidedly hothouse Spanish-set narrative concerns Ambrosio (Vincent When a mysterious masked youth is taken in at his monastery, Ambrosio finds himself confronting supernatural forces, and his own illicit attraction to a beautiful admirer (Joséphine Japy). Moll’s film mixes lurid dashes of Iberian-flavoured Euro-horror with art-cinema composure. But above all, he takes an audacious risk in truly honouring the spirit of Lewis’s narrative, in all its extremity. The result is a film that Buñuel would surely recognise as his legacy, right through to the mischievous philosophical pay-off. - Jonathan Romney, BFI London Film Festival
