"Angelica" (2015, Mitchell Lichtenstein, Pierpoline Films) is a ghost story set in Victorian England, and loosely based on a novel of the same name by Arthur Phillips.
Mitchell Lichtenstein, the man also behind 2007's "Teeth", brings us a ghost story centred, of course, around the lady bits of a young Victorian woman called Constance (Jena Malone).
Constance marries surgeon Joseph Barton (Ed Stoppard) and soon falls pregnant with their child, Angelica. However, after a traumatic birth, the Bartons are warned to halt all future sexual intercourse; something that both Constance and Joseph find difficult to adhere to. Constance also suffers from severe postpartum depression and finds she cannot separate herself from Angelica for any length of time, to the extent that it further damages her marriage.
When Constance begins to tell of a sexually explicit apparition of a man haunting the room of Angelica, Joseph dismisses this as further strange 'womanly' behaviour, leading Constance to seek the help of their servant, Nora (Tovah Feldschuh) and her occultist friend and con-artist, Anne Montague (Janet McTeer).
A film that attempts to straddle the line of elegant Victorian stuffiness and perversity, but is subject to a heavy-handedness that leans further towards the latter. Without the strong lead from Malone, who manages to maintain an air of decorum despite the plot's many indignities, it would be a somewhat difficult watch. Many of the scenes head more towards incidental humour and the film lacks the more horror elements that would usually be associated with a Victorian ghost tale.
