These Violent Delights (2026)

Every so often a film comes along with the courage to trust its audience completely, and These Violent Delights is exactly that. Scottish Ballet's first feature is a wordless, wildly vivid retelling of Romeo and Juliet told entirely through dance, and it is a bold, beautiful and genuinely captivating piece of work. It will not be for everyone, but if you come to it with an open mind you are in for something special. Four stars, and to the right viewer it could comfortably be more.

The first thing that hits you is the look of it. The cinematography, by David Liddell, is astonishing, and the use of colour is some of the most striking I have seen in a good while. There is an almost Dario Argento quality to the palette, those deep, saturated reds and blues washing across the screen, and directors Christopher Hampson and Oscar Sansom lean into it without a flicker of hesitation. The film opens on a long, dialogue-free expressive dance, several minutes of pure movement, and rather than easing you in gently it simply announces what kind of experience this is going to be. I was hooked almost at once.

What dialogue there is arrives in fragments of Shakespeare's own verse, and the story unfolds in a grand, faintly decadent mansion that suits the heightened emotion perfectly. The dinner sequence is a highlight, the entire cast dancing as they eat, the whole frame alive with that same vibrant colour. It is expressive, precise and completely absorbing, and it is here that the sheer level of skill on display becomes impossible to ignore.

I should be honest about the bar I was holding it to. I only recently gave The Red Shoes five stars, so any dance film is walking into a very high standard, and These Violent Delights does not quite reach that all-time-great tier. But that is hardly a criticism when the choreography is this good and the decision to tell the whole story through movement is this bold. The choreographers credited here have made something cohesive and thrilling rather than a patchwork, and Kayla-Maree Tarantolo and Ishan Mahabir-Stokes make a compelling Juliet and Romeo.

You cannot really assess this as acting in the conventional sense, and yet you cannot fault the performances at all. Everyone on screen is plainly an accomplished dancer, and the emotion they convey through movement alone does more than a page of dialogue ever could. At around seventy minutes the film is judged beautifully too. It says what it wants to say and then it stops, never once outstaying its welcome, which is a discipline a good many longer films could learn from.

If I have a note, it is simply that the film wears its niche proudly. This is dance cinema, unapologetically, and viewers who need a conventional narrative hook or a more familiar sense of performance may find themselves held at arm's length. But that feels less like a flaw and more like the point. I kept thinking this is exactly the sort of film I would love to show a GCSE Dance class, precisely because it demonstrates how varied and expressive the medium can be.

Four stars, then, for a brave, gorgeous and superbly crafted piece of work. These Violent Delights is a triumph of colour, movement and nerve, and while it may divide audiences, that is exactly what the most interesting art tends to do. If you love dance you will adore it, and if you have never given it a chance, this might just be the film that changes your mind.

Reviewed from a screener provided by Scottish Ballet. These Violent Delights is in UK and Irish cinemas from 21 October.

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