Young wife wages bloody personal rebellion in 'Lady Macbeth'

“Unsex me here” was Lady Macbeth's plea for manly ferocity in Shakespeare's tragedy, but the protagonist of “Lady Macbeth” has no such designs on shedding her perfectly potent femininity in William Oldroyd's austere but thick-blooded drama about a young, 19th century woman's unrepentant rebellion.

Having been sold in marriage for some land to a wretched family in rural northern England, Katherine (extraordinary newcomer Florence Pugh) finds herself effectively imprisoned in a drab house surrounded by foggy, desolate plains. Stay indoors, she's urged more than once.

Katherine pays these suggestions no heed. Out in the fields she scans the landscape like a desperate explorer looking for any sign of life.

Among her new family, she might as well be an extraterrestrial. Smooth-skinned, youthful (Pugh was 19 at the time of filming) and fresh, she's the direct inverse of her craggy and cranky husband Alexander (Paul Hilton) and her even craggier and crankier father-in-law Boris (Christopher Fairbank).

The latter presides miserly over the estate, ordering Katherine to see to her wifely duties with “more vigor.” At one point he admonishes her: “You have no idea of the damage you can cause.”

Oh, really? Katherine, it turns out, is far more aware of her considerable power for destruction than he.

While they're away, she encounters a charismatic farmhand named Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis). They commence an affair that begins audaciously and quickly grows ever-more brazen. She makes no effort to hide their very audible lovemaking from the staff - most notably the housemaid Anna (Naomi Ackie) - nor from the men who would be her keepers. Vigor? She's got plenty.

This being 1865, certain roadblocks arise, but none that Katherine can't resolve with a bit of poison or something rougher.

The tale, slightly shortened here, comes from Nikolai Leskov's 1865 novel “Lady Macbeth and the Mtsensk District,” which Shostakovich turned into an opera in the '30s and the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda adapted into the 1962 film “Siberian Lady Macbeth.” (The Shakespeare reference is in name and bloodiness, but is mostly a jumping off point.)

The direction of Oldroyd, making his feature-film debut from Alice Birch's script, is spare and economic. It opens with fleeting images of their wedding and largely dispenses with back story.

Pugh's performance is calm and certain; it's one of the more exciting breakthroughs of the year. Her flaunting of propriety is at first almost comic, and she carries it to increasingly dark ends.

Questions of her methods surely arise as the body count piles up. But her righteousness is never in doubt. Team Katherine forever.

“Lady Macbeth”

★ ★ ★

Starring: Florence Pugh, Cosmo Jarvis, Paul Hilton, Christopher Fairbank, Naomi Ackie

Directed by: William Oldroyd

Other: A Roadside Attractions release. Rated R for violence, sexual situations, nudity and language. 89 minutes