Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film - Nominee 2019
An atmospheric, coming-of-age love story steeped in eerie mystery and inspired by the gothic vampire novel of the same name. 15-year-old Lara lives with her father and her strict governess, Miss Fontaine, in total isolation and is struggling to find an outlet for her curiosity and burgeoning sexuality. When a carriage crash nearby brings a young girl into the family home to recuperate, Lara becomes obsessed while everyone else becomes suspicious.
Cast: Jessica Raine, Tobias Menzies, Hannah Rae, Devrim Lingnau
International Cinema Release 2020 by Icon Film Distribution Australia, Film Movement US
Reviews:
In Their Own League ***** 5 stars “ a film that took my breath away and left me awestruck by what I had seen on the big screen… boldly beautiful and thought-provoking ” Bianca Garner
Filmotomy ***** 5 stars “Carmilla is a film that feels like a classic waiting to be studied and analyzed in film schools for years to come”
Guardian Observer **** 4 stars “flirts with vampiric blood lust but is most satisfying when it delves into the superstition and repression that squeeze the breath out of life for young women” Wendy Ide
Sight and Sound “a quietly shivery, coldly angry fresh reading of a key gothic text” Kim Newman
Times “Harris’s Carmilla is perhaps one of the most febrile, inventive and truest , while it avoids the baroque clichés that have persistently separated the vampire sub-genre from its Romantic roots… Harris’s keen sense for Gothic atmosphere is both sumptuous and menacing.”
Screen Daily "Carmilla perfects the experience not just of first love, but of the heady excitement of being completely bewitched by someone new” Sarah Ward