Reviews

Though not a direct true to life adaptation of John Merrick's real life story (despite claiming to be that) it's a beautiful film with a heart-wrenching ending.

The setting is 1860's Victorian London where an important surgeon named Frederick Treves (Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins) meets a hideously deformed man named John Merrick (the late John Hurt) who is resigned himself to his life as a carnival sideshow freak owned by a Mr.

It starts off as a typical Lynch film with cross-faded imagery, in this film we get elephants and the violent distress of a woman.

Philips cathedral, obscured but for a solitary spire by a brick wall outside Merrick's window -- and which Merrick, both in the film and in real life, built an impressive model of by relying on his imagination -- symbolizing the beautiful soul obscured beneath the disfigured body.

This is a movie and movies are art, and as such uses the craft of the film maker to capture the essences of the man they called an Elephant Man.

When it comes to any film that's made in the era where colour cinematography is the widely available and accepted norm, any film that can not only make it work but feel essential to the film as a whole has to be impressive; if you have to seriously struggle to think of this film in colour (much less...