Strickland is a sensory filmmaker. He is less interested in dialogue than in texture . The sound design is extraordinary: the whisper of a velvet glove, the click of a metal buckle, the hypnotic thrum of a moth’s wings against a glass jar. The cinematography (by Nicholas D. Knowland) is lush and anachronistic, full of deep, saturated reds and golds, giving the film the look of a 1970s European softcore art film, but without any actual nudity or explicit sex.
What you get is one of the most exquisitely strange and intellectually rigorous films about the nature of love, control, and consent ever committed to celluloid. The Duke Of Burgundy
If there is a flaw, it is that the film’s deliberate pacing can sometimes feel like a test of endurance. The repetition is the point—showing the monotonous, unsexy reality of scheduling your kinks—but around the 60-minute mark, the film’s small runtime starts to feel longer than it is. Strickland is a sensory filmmaker