Corsage (now streaming on Hulu) boasts the best poster in recent memory: Vicky Krieps, playing Empress Elisabeth of Austria, giving the single-finger salute and firing eye-daggers at the camera. Marie Kreutzer writes and directs this historical-fiction drama about the 19th-century aristocrat who was famous for obsessively maintaining her beauty. The film plays fast and loose with facts – very much so, especially that ending – as it imagines what her inner life might have been like. And, to nobody’s surprise, Krieps carries the film with an extraordinary performance. 

The Gist: ELISABETH NEEDS AIR. And not just because she’s seeing how long she can hold her breath in the tub, for reasons that escape me, although it’s quite the introductory visual: If she can’t “breathe” in her position as sightly accoutrement to the monarch, she might as well strengthen her lungs in order to endure it. She feels cooped up in the Austrian estate she shares with her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister); her only duty, she complains, is to get her hair braided. She frequently goes for walks or rides her horse – to get some fresh air, she says – and travels regularly, to remedy what Franz Joseph calls “restlessness,” a word he utters as if it were a taboo condition. 

We see Elisabeth getting dressed, chastising her attendant for not having the strength to tighten her corset to her specifications. She barely eats and practices gymnastics and fencing – fencing! – to maintain her figure, and that, coupled with the mighty squeeze of her corset, prompts her to faint regularly. But we soon learn that she fakes her faints, presumably to maintain her public persona. She’s very aware of the rumors that swirl around her. Victorian-era women must be fair and flimsy, it seems, although the truth is, Elisabeth is far from that. 

And so: She’s the subject of a slo-mo strut as she enters the room with her all-female entourage, side-eyeing the camera with a razorlike glance. She simmers about the frequent half-sleights from people who comment on her age, which as of today, her birthday, Christmas Eve, 1877, is now 40. She’s a fading beauty to anyone too cloistered in the cruel norms of aristocratic society – or too angry with the class divide – to consider the reality of the situation. Of course, that reality also includes the on-many-levels uncomfortable fact Elisabeth’s doctor shares with her, that the average age of death of her female subjects is, indeed, 40 years. And she smokes cigarettes, scandalously, perhaps to curb her appetite, perhaps to provoke because she doesn’t give a f—. 

It’s worth noting that Franz Joseph’s lavish and fluffy sideburns are pasted on – appearances must be maintained by the most powerful couple in Austria. That applies to their happiness as a couple, which seems long dead. They have affairs, she with a handsome horse attendant during a trip to England, he with a sweet 18-year-old woman wowed by the presence of the emperor. Their son, on the brink of moving to Prague for military school, chastises his mother for “not considering her position”; their pre-teen daughter is by turns adoring and exasperated by her mother; in the mansion, a room is roped off, left untouched after another daughter died as a baby. Elisabeth frequently visits a mental hospital, handing out candies to suffering patients. She pauses to wrinkle her brow sadly at a wailing woman, tied to a bed and literally caged. Why is Elisabeth here? Out of compassion? Or is she reminding herself of her fate should she cease toeing the line? Likely both. She’s complicated, this Elisabeth.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The last time we enjoyed anachronisms in soundtrack and visual cues in a period piece was Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette; the last time we saw a portrait of capital-R Royal suffocation via a tour-de-force lead performance was when Kristen Stewart played Princess Diana in Spencer.

Performance Worth Watching: The complexity of Krieps’ characterization is astounding – at the same time she endears us to the deliciously spirited and flawed Elisabeth, the actor maintains an equally delicious element of mystery within the woman, telling us that this woman’s life has been an unendingly lonely quest to define herself. (Those of us who saw Krieps in Phantom Thread and Bergman Island shouldn’t be surprised by any of this.)

Memorable Dialogue: which is long enough that one of her maidservants proclaims, “She scares me so much.”

Sex and Skin: Full-frontal Krieps; a couple of awkward sex scenes that tell us all kinds of things about Elisabeth and Franz Joseph’s relationship, without a single line of dialogue.

Our Take: So when is Elisabeth actually fainting and when is she fake-fainting? We’ll likely never know. But it’s clear why she feigns that weakness: To maintain the proper facade. To have some semblance of control over some portions of her life. And likely because it amuses her. This woman is cognitive dissonance in human form, and it makes sense, considering how she’s torn between the woman she wants to be and the woman she feels she has to be. Royalty, Kruetzer implies, is an exquisite form of torture, especially for women.

Although Marie Antoinette’s gonzo stylishness is a touchpoint, Kruetzer’s approach is more understated in its defiance of period-biopic norms. The absorbing and lusciously puzzling Corsage – the title is German for “corset” – exists on an uneasy middle ground between sadly tragic and playful, honing in on the all-but-unknowable protagonist as she tightropes between conformity and rebellion. The only time the film is plainspoken is when Elisabeth says, “I have nothing to hold onto except myself.” Otherwise, moments of joy (a nighttime skinny dip with a lover) and misery (so many excruciatingly stuffy meals with her husband and a bevy of guests) are cushioned by fascinatingly unsettling depictions of marital toxicity, hot-and-cold interactions between Elisabeth and her children, and multiple instances where she just… can’t… get… her corset… tight enough. 

It’s clear Elisabeth is suffering from a mighty depression. She tortures herself with that corset, indulges herself with her horses and lovers. When she visits the asylum, she likely feels kinship with the restrained women, but surely also realizes that freedom is forever relative. Kruetzer and Krieps had a vision for this version of Empress Elisabeth: a complicated public figure who functions as a springboard for an exploration of femininity and womanhood both past and present – hence the 19th-century setting mingling with the 21st-century anachronisms. The film also functions as a meta-commentary on the subgenre: If period-piece dramas like Corsage showed a little more verve and a little less orthodoxy, it’d be welcome progress. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Krieps is one of the best in the business, and she makes Corsage a rich, captivating biopic.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.