"Miss Julie" is claustrophobic and distressing. It's a top-notch dramatic play stuffed into the confines of a four-sided movie screen. Wealthy heiress Julie (Jessica Chastain) fancies John (Colin Farrell), her father's valet. She seduces him, and allows herself to be seduced by him. The aftermath of their coitus is fraught with class and social anxieties by two people trapped at different edges of the spectrum. They argue a lot. Yikes.
Like I mentioned previously, "Julie" was originally a play, written in 1888 and reflective of the social anxieties of the time. It's not like our anxieties these days are all that different. It sells. What doesn't quite sell is the way director Liv Ullmann chose to convey the play on screen. The story is told almost exclusively through conversation between Julie and John, with occasional appearances by Kathleen (Samantha Morton), the estate's cook. Ullmann tries to match the script's intensity by focusing on her actors in in closeups. This works beautifully during the major monologues, but becomes exhausting in between.
The monologues. Oh, the monologues. Farrell and Chastain are forces to be reckoned with. John and Julie are characters with immense complexity, manipulating each other in intense back-and-forth. They're wonders to watch. The movie belongs to them. If you're a fan of the material or the actors, "Miss Julie" is definitely worth a rental.
If you aren't predisposed to Farrell and Chastain, however, there isn't much here. It's too quickly exhausting, too much of a downer and not enough of an experience to warrant the two-hour running time.