Anna Karenina (2012)

This film is so cleverly done to the extent that I, and no-one else I went with, could understand it. Here is a perfectly simple but haunting story, laced with a stylish and disturbing setting. The film sort of winds in and out of being a film and a play being performed on a stage, with an ever so slightly steampunk style. You're never quite sure whether this world of Anna's is real or not, or whether she's mad. It's very hard to explain exactly but I will try non the less. In the fashion of a play, the characters simply walk though a door and they're in a snowy train station, boarding a toy train that belongs to the son, or they are arranging to meet someone somewhere and suddenly, walls are moving and the setting is changing and then they're in a different room. The very last scene is her children playing in a meadow, and the meadow is on a stage in the theatre (?) Yes, it's very hard to get but I needed to set a scene of this so you can actually understand what I'm going on about. Keira Knightly plays Anna Karenina with grace and that edge of insanity that is needed in this fantastically twisted world. Anna waltzes through life as a beautiful status symbol, whether dancing in a masque or indeed getting on a toy train. Of course a handsome young man comes along and stands point blank between her and her husband of so many years. She falls for him and they have a not-so-secret affair of which everyone but her husband seems to realize. This affair becomes the ruin of her and the anchor of her madness as Handsome Young Man becomes interested in some other high society princess. It all ends with a toy train and a meadow on a stage. I wont say any more than that. It's haunting. It's twisted. It's ever so slightly steampunk. It's fantastic.