Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is not so much a film as it is a waking nightmare a meticulously carved obsidian slab of Shakespearean horror. Stripped down to its barest bones and shot in cavernous black-and-white by Bruno Delbonnel, this is Macbeth as a German Expressionist fever dream, where every archway looms like a guillotine and the very air seems thick with impending doom.

Denzel Washington’s Macbeth is a study in slow unraveling. He doesn’t roar into madness; he sinks into it, his voice dropping to a whisper as the walls close in. It’s a performance of terrifying restraint, where the most chilling moments come not from his outbursts, but from the quiet realization flickering across his face I have sold my soul, and it wasn’t worth the price. Opposite him, Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth is all calculation and corroded steel, her ambition curdling into something far more pathetic than evil. Their chemistry is less a partnership than a mutual infection.

The true star, though, is the film’s aesthetic. Shot on soundstages with forced perspectives that would make Fritz Lang weep, this Macbeth exists outside time part medieval, part modernist, wholly unsettling. The witches (a mesmerizing Kathryn Hunter, her body contorted into something inhuman) don’t just prophesy; they infect the frame, their voices slithering through the soundtrack like smoke. The score, all dissonant strings and sudden silences, turns even daylight into something ominous.

If there’s a flaw, it’s that the film’s icy precision can feel distancing. This isn’t a Macbeth that sweeps you up in its emotion; it holds you at arm’s length, forcing you to admire its craftsmanship even as its heart remains just out of reach. But when it clicks as in the haunting “tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy, Washington’s face half-lost in shadow it’s transcendent.