Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

I suppose I ought to be kinder to this film. It was made in 1998, and so it's part of the New Queer Cinema, and it's trying to do something by telling a queer story and filmicly canonizing Francis Bacon as a queer artist. But... 

Did I hate this? Yes, I believe I did. It's so miserable, and there's just no reason for the script to be quite this miserable. But worse yet, it is shot bafflingly. It's all fisheye closeups and disrupted angles and distortion. Until it's not. But there isn't any rhyme or reason to it. It's pretending, I suppose, to be doing a filmic version of Bacon's paintings, but it doesn't actually do that at all; it's giving us distortion, but it isn't Baconic distortion. 

Daniel Craig offers some very good acting here, and he is a brightly miserable light in this miserable movie, but this is a definite misfire.

I watched this on Criterion just before it left the channel at the end of December 2020. I'd been meaning to see it for years, mostly because it was a) early Daniel Craig and b) Bacon, whose work I love. But man what a miserable film.

Oh also, the devil appears nowhere in this movie, and I'm not sure if a single person utters the word love even once.