The Thirteenth Tale

I love Gothic. I have been steadily reading my way through the back-catalogue of greats from Le Fanu through Poe, M R James to Will Self. I like not just to read and enjoy, but to carry a story with me forever. For that to happen the story has to get inside of me; it has to creep in slowly under my skin, and then shake me up from the inside. The Thirteenth tale does just that. From the off, the makers employ all the best Gothic themes in order to summon feeling; the grand but degenerate house,wildly baroque gardens,sense-memory flashbacks, costume, unheimlich twins. It adds to the tension with filmic techniques- the pared down narrative,filters, uncanny usage of colour,slow close-ups and misty long-shots. The result is pure feeling. For me, the feeling begins as mystery and a slow sense of disorientation and unreality, but develops through anxiety, into something unnameable strange and completely absorbing. This film is pure Gothic. I feel alarmed, I feel shaky. This film will live with me for a while yet.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito were twins. One inherited all the noble qualities, and the other... didn't. The twins in "The Thirteenth Tale" are rather less amusing. Madeleine Power is brilliant as the nine-year-old girls Emmeline and Adeline (Ella-Rose Wood skilfully doubles). One of these twins (under that cascade of gorgeous red hair) has the makings of a sociopath. You wouldn't want to be governess to this difficult duo, but Hester Barrow (Alexandra Roach) comes from the school of no-nonsense firmness. Also from a school of too clever by half rationality, leading to this "scientific" procedure - which you just know will not end well.

It's English Gothic. There's a whiff, nay, a stench of corruption within the tainted aristocratic blood, yea, in the befouled DNA. So mental instability is always going to be on the menu. The stolid servants (Janet Amsden as The Missus and Robert Pugh as John The Dig) ought to be secure enough - unless they get drawn into the cesspool.

If you want to enjoy this film, you'll need to accept the conventions. Some elements of the story are super-credible, other elements look cliched or artificially engineered. Is dying author Vida Winter (Vanessa Redgrave) trying to absolve some collective guilt by "confessing" to her chosen biographer Margaret Lea (Olivia Colman)? Lea doesn't come across as tough enough to be a professional biographer. But maybe it's Lea's vulnerability that keeps Winter talking, spilling the beans and spilling them in the right order for her fantastical narrative to keep us watching. A movie like this draws you in with its well made beginning; but whether you'll say at the end, "This was time well spent" is not specified on the manufacturer's warranty card.

'The Thirteenth Tale', a new BBC drama, tells the story of madness in an upper class family. There's a twist in the tale, but finding a way to convey it critically maims the dramatic structure: the story is told, entirely in hindsight, in a way that kills engagement, promoting the mundane story of the telling into the foreground over the potentially more interesting story that's actually being told. One can also note that this is the sort of tale where, however neglected or crazy its young protagonists are supposed to be, they never fail to look anything but ravishing. I found it psychologically unconvincing and essentially dull.

This is really one of my favorites I've seen throughout the year of 2013.

Cinematography 8/10: The cinematography is beautiful. Most of the shots and standpoints in this film were well done.

Characters 7/10: Throughout this film, the characters were well- developed, but not every character was interesting and had no real background.

Plot 9/10: This movie had a very good plot, there wasn't any plot holes from my perspective and it was an intriguing ride.

Cast 8/10: The cast was well-chosen and all had a very good performance. I've always been a fan of Vanessa Redgrave and this performance of hers as Vida Winter was incredibly well done.

Conclusion: This movie is great and I give it an 8.25/10.

Director James Kent has a sensitive touch that deserves recognition and praise in this age of formulaic CGI films where character is more often than not ignored, or simply mass-produced to wooden specifications.

The film's curious title, THE THIRTEEN TALE, refers to a book of just 12 tales. The 13th tale amounts to the narrative that its dying author - superbly portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave - is conveying to a contracted biographer, intelligently played by Janet Amsden. The author's name I could not narrow down to Adeline or Emmeline because of the strange, almost transmutable relation between the twin sisters. However, one can reasonably assume that the 13th and final is the tale written by Amsden, who reveals that she too had a twin sister who died knocked down by a car, a death for which she blames herself. Thus, Redgrave and Amsden in a sense become spiritual twins, too, and that final tale is the result of their collaboration which starts edgily but ends on a tender, friendly note.

This TV film largely shot in a decaying manor house that still reflects past grandeur has the quality of Gothic vision and contained horror interlaced with credible, if deliberately evasive, characterization. Bedridden Redgrave, taking liquid morphine to relieve constant physical pain - to add to the pain of losing her sister(s) - narrates in a rather dettached manner, admitting that she physically beat up her sister but could not tell why.

Thus, she leaves her biographer with some interpretative loose ends that the latter supposedly weaves together into THE THIRTEENTH TALE.

Exquisite cinematography by Jean-Philippe Gossart, fittingly restrained musical score, sharp yet touching screenplay by Diane Setterfield off the novel by Christopher Hampton.

Definite must-see. 8/10.