The Strange Case of Angelica

A photographer falls in love with a young woman whose postmortem portrait he has been summoned to take in this film “hovering somewhere between ghost story and fairy tale, . . . a beguiling meditation on the ontological and illusionist powers of cinema. . . . [It] recovers and unsettles the photographic roots of cinematic art in the figure of the photographer, the man with the still-but-somehow-moving camera, whose instrument, we learn, is wonderfully imprecise and uncontrollable—since by ‘capturing’ the real it also unleashes the imagination” (Haden Guest, Film Comment). Sabine Lancelin’s “magnificent images, which blend Gothic with the everyday, [recall] Gordon Willis at his peak” (Robert Koehler, Variety).