60
Richard Laxton’s painterly film combines the gothic shadows of Hitchcock’s Rebecca with the gut-wrenching romance of A Royal Affair. The result is dark and offbeat, but as a murky anti-romance, Gray is undeniably effective.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
40
Handsome, well-mounted but dull, dull, dull.
60
Time Out London by Cath Clarke
It’s a thoughtful, well-acted and perceptive drama. However, for a film about a love triangle the sparks don’t exactly fly.
40
So while the film clearly wants to be an affirmation of female agency, it plays instead like nothing more than the story of a girl who marries an ogre and waits to be freed by true love’s kiss.
50
This admirable, watercolor-delicate tale of individual feminist emancipation never quite blooms into living color, hampered by spotty casting and Richard Laxton’s overly deliberate direction.
88
Slant Magazine by Matt Brennan
It spins the narrative of one of the Victorian art world's most mysterious marriages into a study of life lived and life merely examined, a fecund fairy tale in reverse.
60
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
It’s a little hammy and soapy, with an occasional Pythonesque sense of its own importance but this film, directed by Richard Laxton, is performed with gusto.
50
Whatever “it” is, that spark that film actresses and actors have that makes them interesting and empathetic and anything else on the screen, Fanning doesn’t have it.
40
The Hollywood Reporter by Stephen Dalton
Effie Gray is an exquisitely dreary slice of middlebrow armchair theater which adds little new to a much-filmed story.
60
There are clever and sensitive touches right through, and a moving ending. But Fanning seems wholly uncomfortable, and not always intentionally.