Sightlines · a viewing thread

Drunk on Design

Watch these together for the rush of maximalist, color-drenched cinema where a woman is made, remade, or consumed by an art form — ballet, fashion, gothic desire — and the production design does half the storytelling.

A crowd-friendly run anchored by recent hits (Poor Things, Cruella, Coppola's Dracula) with two ravishing pieces of film-school canon underneath it; mostly easy and gorgeous, though Suspiria asks a tolerance for stylized gore.

• The Red Shoes (1948)
• Suspiria (1977)
• Poor Things (2023)
• Cruella (2021)
• Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
• The Favourite (2018) — The Lanthimos film before Poor Things — the overlooked one to pull down if that fisheye-lensed, costume-drunk opulence hooked you, here turned on three women circling a crumbling queen.
• Last Night in Soho (2021) — If Cruella's fashion-London and Suspiria's neon dread both landed, this is the under-seen one that fuses them — a fashion student remade and consumed by a Swinging-Sixties Soho that curdles into gothic horror.
• Orlando (1992) — The ravishing, forgotten Tilda Swinton gem that rhymes with these on pure transformation-as-spectacle — a nobleman made and remade across centuries while the painterly production design does half the telling.
• Dracula (2025) — The recent film to pull down right after Coppola's Dracula — another operatic, grief-cursed immortal renouncing God and chasing a lost bride across centuries, staged in the same ravishing, design-drunk gothic register.
• Wicked (2024) — If the color-drenched transformations here landed, this is the one to watch next — a green-skinned outcast remade into the Wicked Witch across a saturated, maximalist production where the design does half the storytelling.
• "Wuthering Heights" (2026) — The new one that rhymes with these on gothic desire and design-drunk excess — Brontë's doomed romance retold at full consuming volume, all Yorkshire-moor atmosphere and lush, obsessive production.