Miss Julie

The film is visually bland, with only a couple of bookending outdoor sequences around a handful of interior sets.

It smoulders and smokes and generates some heat but it never really bursts into flame.

Anyone interested in spellbinding performances, however, should see Miss Julie.

Morton, one of the least artificial actresses in the world, charts her character's heartbreak without any of the self-pity normally assigned to ordinary women.

What Ullmann's done is create the ideal conditions for these three to do electrifying work with each other. She maintains control so they can lose it.

"Miss Julie" is a rather strange experience, with its consistently static medium shots of the three actors, as they roar their lines at one another. But it has an undeniable power.

The film has a singular focus on these characters and their power struggles of class and gender, but fails to ever feel like it's really going anywhere.

Miss Julie, directed by Liv Ullmann whose only concern is delivering an honest rendition of August Strindberg, succeeds in doing just that.

Miss Julie's acid dialogue and sardonic twists burn down to the bone of costume drama's fattened arm, its darkness closer to original-series Upstairs Downstairs than to polished one-percenter porno Downton Abbey.

Altogether, it is a classy production, but it rarely gets past the outward forms and down to the inner truths.

Chastain is as brittle and fragile a Miss Julie as ever there was.

It starts off as a will-they-won't-they as to whether Chastain's baron's daughter will sleep with Farrell. It ends up as a will-they-won't-they ever shut up. Should have been called Shouting Miss Julie.