Anna Biller’s films are skin-deep – but how deep the skin is! In perhaps no working director’s films is makeup more important. In 2016’s new cult classic The Love Witch, statement eyeshadows and caked-on foundation too thick for high-definition, executed by key makeup artist Emma Willis and her team, paid literally pore-close homage to the luridness of the giallo, while its overt and effortful performance of femininity illustrated the allure and the trap of beauty, both for the men drawn fatefully to women and for the women hopelessly seeking men’s love.

The Face of Horror, Biller’s long-awaited follow-up, begins with Eleanor (Kristine Froseth) putting her face on. (The key makeup artist on the film is Ivana Nemcova.) The film is set in an undefined medieval past, and Eleanor hand-mixes a cream to lighten her complexion, adding crushed red powders to redden her cheeks and lips, before turning to a mirror, then a status symbol and a novelty, to contemplate herself and her appearance in the world. Men ​“think we are angels only when we look like angels,” she tells her sister Beatrice (Ellie Bamber), but they also distrust women’s beauty, believing that ​“the devil is behind a lady’s mirror.” 

An adaptation of the frequently filmed Japanese ghost-story Yotsuya Kaidan, in which the cast-aside wife of a social-climbing samurai haunts him from beyond the grave, The Face of Horror analyses male lust and feminine revenge in an era of primal gender norms, and is so rudimentary in its treatment of reverence and rape that it seems to be inventing feminism from first principles.

The man Eleanor hopes to please is Edward Carnefax, a knight introduced mid-pillage with his squire Richard (Leo Suter). Two brutes with oiled, chiseled abs underneath their creaky armour, they grunt and groan with every sword stroke, and, encountering Eleanor’s disapproving father on the road, they strike him down, leaving Eleanor with no male protector and clearing the way for Edward to marry her. But cut to a year later and new mother Eleanor is sickly and dull-visaged, with heavy dark circles below her eyes. Riding out in search of fame and fortune, and to avoid his domestic responsibilities, Edward rescues the helpless Lady Isabella (Bella Heathcote) from two brigands, and finds himself in her favour; having been married advantageously to an old dullard, she plots for Edward herself to dispose of their spouses, and trade up.

Froseth is the liveliest part of the film, pivoting deftly between a hacking cough and girlish, clinging avidity, like a consumptive Jeannie Berlin in The Heartbreak Kid, selling Eleanor’s unreciprocated need. She tries to disguise her pallor with a ghostly white powder, but Edward shakes her off with another facial application, a poison that burns half her face away. 

Designed here by Tereza Beck and Jack Firman, this is the standard makeup effect in Yotsuya adaptations (notably an emphatic and atmospheric 1959 film by Nobuo Nakagawa), and it’s executed phenomenally, with a sagging, bulging dead eyeball and raw, seeping cheeks. The duality of Eleanor’s face, demonic and angelic, looms as a manifestation of Edward’s misogyny, fear and guilt. Freed by death from any illusions that her husband will protect her, she becomes a feminine grotesque. The duality of her appearance makes a far more eloquent statement about attraction and repulsion than the dialogue that repeatedly summarises the movie’s themes and treats as revelatory the insight that organised religion has historically propped up the patriarchy and justified the subjugation of women.

Like The Love Witch, The Face of Horror is a pastiche of low-budget exploitation films that turns their disturbing psychosexual undercurrents into gender-essentialist homilies, but pleasurably and elaborately replicates their gauzy sensuality and resourceful sumptuousness. From the blood-red gothic font of its opening title card, the film is in the lineage of Hammer Films and Roger Corman, recreating their backlot Dark Ages, a time of castles and ballads and plagues, with lighting gels, matte paintings, in-camera tricks like superimpositions and practical effects like prosthetic severed heads, and costumes in bold primary colours that pop on celluloid. Dragging as it does across its two hours of declamatory dialogue, The Face of Horror also follows Hammer and Corman’s medieval films in being as static as it is stylish.