114 min | NR | December 23, 2022 | IFC Films
Vienna, 1877. Empress Elisabeth turns forty and the court has already decided she is finished. So she starts setting it on fire from the inside.
Empress Elisabeth of Austria reaches forty and discovers her only remaining function is decorative. The court measures her waist, weighs her body, and reads her hair as a barometer of imperial health. Marie Kreutzer takes the most famous beauty in Europe and traps her inside the role of national ornament. The film is not a biography of a queen. It is a study of a woman who realizes her face is a state asset and decides to ruin it.
Vicky Krieps plays Elisabeth with a coiled physical control that hides open contempt. She holds her breath while servants lace the corset that gives the film its title, and she turns the act of being dressed into a daily suffocation. Krieps lets the boredom curdle into provocation. She extends her middle finger to a dinner table, she fakes faints, and she cuts her own hair in a gesture aimed straight at the men who own her image. Florian Teichtmeister plays Franz Josef as a husband who manages his wife the way he manages a province, with patience and no warmth. Katharina Lorenz gives Marie Festetics a quiet loyalty that Elisabeth tests past the point of cruelty.
Kreutzer writes and directs with a deliberate refusal of period-drama reverence. She drops anachronisms into the frame on purpose. A mop bucket sits in a marble palace hall, a telephone appears decades early, and the soundtrack breaks into modern songs while the corseted figures move through gilded rooms. Judith Kaufmann shoots the interiors with flat, even light that strips the romance out of the empire and leaves the rooms looking cold and institutional. The framing strands Elisabeth in the dead center of enormous halls. The architecture itself becomes the cage.
This is a film about a woman who can rebel against everything except the mirror. Elisabeth controls who sees her, what she eats, and when she rides, and none of it frees her. Kreutzer builds the whole picture around the gap between private defiance and public function. The formal tricks announce their own cleverness, and the emotional payoff stays a step behind the concept. The provocation lands more often than it moves.