At the age of 20, debutante Leonora Carrington ran away from London to be an artist in Paris, living with the surrealist Max Ernst, who was married and more than twice her age. But you won’t notice the uncomfortable age gap in this biopic, in which Carrington is played by Olivia Vinall, who is in her late 30s and portrays the artist for a decade or so, from Paris until Carrington settled in Mexico in the 1940s. Vinall’s performance is pleasingly spiky, fierce and uncompromising, fit for a woman who did not seek anyone’s approval – and does some heavy lifting in this otherwise tepid film.
It’s adapted from a biographical novel by Elena Poniatowska. We meet Carrington arriving in Paris, where she discovers that the surrealists’ circle is another male-dominated world, with its own objectionable attitudes to women. Carrington, though, gives short shrift to men such as André Breton and Salvador Dalí, drivelling on about woman as the divine muse to be worshipped. The dialogue clunks along unconvincingly, such as one line spoken to Ernst (Alexander Scheer): “I don’t want to be your wife. I want to be your lover.” The pair move to southern France, where they seem to work productively – portrayed in slightly dull scenes – until the outbreak of the second world war in 1939, when Ernst, a German citizen, is imprisoned.
What follows is a dark period in Carrington’s life – and provides some of the most effective, if difficult, scenes in the film. After crossing the border to Spain, she becomes unwell, experiencing a mental health crisis; in a psychiatric hospital, Carrington has a barbaric drug treatment inflicted on her, strapped down and subjected to induced convulsions that leave her comatose, head lolling. Inexplicably, the film-makers leave out an episode in which her parents dispatch her Irish former nanny to Spain in a submarine to rescue her. Again, the film slips into uneventful storytelling as it shifts to 1940s Mexico, where Carrington lived and worked on her own terms for the rest of her life, largely ignored by the art world. After her death, Carrington became the most valuable British-born female artist at auction when one of her paintings sold for more than £22.5m in 2024.
• Leonora in the Morning Light is in UK and Irish cinemas from 29 May.
