“These Violent Delights” reimagines “Romeo and Juliet” as a kaleidoscopic journey of queer belonging, defiance, and self-discovery. Juliet awakens in The Apothecary, surrounded by the wreckage of a story already ended — daggers, spilled poison, Romeo’s body — before the film rewinds into a fevered hallucination that blurs memory and nightmare, cinema and dance.
Produced by the Scottish Ballet and directed by Oscar Sansom and Christopher Hampson, the film reworks Shakespeare’s tragedy into bold, unapologetically modern territory, from the mirrored dining rooms of the Capulets and Montagues to a queer club reclaimed from an abandoned building, presided over by drag sisters Laurence and Giovanna. Featuring choreography by Julia Cheng, Morgann Runacre-Temple, Myles Thatcher, Sophie Laplane, Nicholas Shoesmith, and Andrea Azzari, and starring Kayla-Maree Tarantolo and Ishan Mahabir-Stokes, the film pulls one of theater’s most iconic tragedies into vivid new form.
This film contains sequences with flashing lights that may affect photosensitive viewers.
