Carmil­la

There are few more lib­er­at­ing sights in a cos­tume dra­ma than a char­ac­ter remov­ing a restric­tive item of cloth­ing at the end of a long day; even if you’ve nev­er expe­ri­enced a ​‘corset-gasm’ first-hand, when­ev­er it occurs on-screen the sense of relief is palpable.

In Emi­ly Har­ris’ first solo direc­to­r­i­al fea­ture, how­ev­er, an act of sar­to­r­i­al sal­va­tion is ren­dered almost like some­thing out of a body hor­ror: a con­cussed woman is care­ful­ly cut out of a bodice, the gar­ment grad­u­al­ly split­ting apart like a ribcage. It’s a strik­ing image in a film where car­nal­i­ty and sen­su­al­i­ty are not always woven togeth­er quite so evocatively.

Con­trary to the title, Carmil­la cen­tres around a teenage girl named Lara (Han­nah Rae), who lives with her father (Greg Wise) in a grand, soul­less manor in the south of Eng­land. With no dis­cernible parental rela­tion­ship to speak of, Lara spends most of her time under the watch­ful eye of Miss Fontaine (Jes­si­ca Raine), a stern, pious woman who it soon emerges is sim­i­lar­ly plagued by feel­ings of iso­la­tion and repres­sion. It is her respon­si­bil­i­ty to keep Lara in line; not only ensur­ing that she pays atten­tion to her stud­ies, but also bind­ing her left hand behind her back in order to curb ​‘sin­ful’ behavior.

One day while out walk­ing, the usu­al­ly tac­i­turn gov­erness opens up to Lara, urg­ing her not to sup­press her impuls­es – but what Miss Fontaine doesn’t yet realise is that Lara’s bur­geon­ing sex­u­al ten­den­cies verge on masochis­tic. This is fur­ther augured by the arrival of a stranger (Devrim Ling­nau), brought to the house in the dead of night fol­low­ing a car­riage acci­dent in the near­by
woods.

Lara is at once attract­ed to the mys­te­ri­ous inter­lop­er, who is fog­gy on the details of her cir­cum­stances (although we sus­pect she may know more than she’s let­ting on). The pair form an intense bond, but seri­ous con­cerns over Carmilla’s true iden­ti­ty – and inten­tions – are raised when Lara is sud­den­ly tak­en ill.
Sheri­dan Le Fanu’s Goth­ic novel­la ​‘Carmil­la’, upon which this film is loose­ly based, was pub­lished in 1872, thus pre­dat­ing Bram Stoker’s ​‘Drac­u­la’ by more than a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry. It is often cit­ed as the ear­li­est lit­er­ary exam­ple of that now well-estab­lished trope: the les­bian vampire.

While Har­ris doesn’t hew par­tic­u­lar­ly close to the vin­tage source mate­r­i­al, she does retain many of its core themes, from com­ing of age and sex­u­al awak­en­ing to jeal­ousy, loss of inno­cence and reli­gious per­se­cu­tion, while at the same time down­play­ing the more super­nat­ur­al ele­ments of the sto­ry. The result is an erot­i­cal­ly-charged peri­od romance more in the vein of William Oldroyd’s bru­tal cham­ber dra­ma Lady Mac­beth than it is a more genre-savvy twist on vam­pire lore like Let the Right One In.

Le Fanu’s eerie tale of female agency and same-sex desire has tend­ed to be mined for raunchy Euro-romp fod­der (see ear­ly ​’70s sex­ploita­tion sta­ples The Vam­pire Lovers and Lust for a Vam­pire), so it’s refresh­ing to see it tack­led from a con­tem­po­rary per­spec­tive. Yet while Carmil­la cer­tain­ly isn’t lack­ing in atmos­phere, it doesn’t quite deliv­er on its allur­ing premise.