Control · reception & legacy

2007 · Anton Corbijn

How Control has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Premiered in Cannes' Directors' Fortnight in 2007 to immediate acclaim, picking up prizes there and Best British Independent Film at the BIFAs — and unlike most instant hits it has held its ground, now routinely cited as one of the great music biopics.

What's debated

The perennial fan debate is Control versus 24 Hour Party People — whether the Joy Division story is better served by Corbijn's solemn monochrome elegy or Winterbottom's irreverent Factory Records comedy, and whether Control's beauty aestheticizes a tragedy.

Its footprint

Its black-and-white frames — Sam Riley smoking, dancing on stage, trudging through Macclesfield — are endlessly screenshotted on Letterboxd and music Tumblr, feeding the same monochrome Joy Division iconography Corbijn himself created as a photographer in 1979.

Where it stands

A Letterboxd favourite and a rite of passage for the music-obsessed cinephile — the film you're assumed to have seen if you own a Joy Division shirt.

★ Did you know? Corbijn had shot the band himself decades earlier — his 1979 London tube-station photograph is one of Joy Division's most famous images, and he directed the 'Atmosphere' video — and he was so committed to the film that he put his own money in when financing wobbled; the actors, meanwhile, performed the songs live, and Sam Riley had already appeared in 24 Hour Party People as Mark E. Smith of the Fall.