Ladyhawke

It has charm, and I can understand the excitement around it and the breakthrough in both Michelle and Rutger's careers. Personally, I suffered quite a bit from this because the fabulousness is killed by the totally inappropriate soundtrack and purposeful exteriors. (17/03/2010)

My unreliable memory knew best. From my childhood years, I remembered Ladyhawke as a whispery, fatally dark, and atypically brutal spectacle. Dark and whispery probably because of the poor quality of our VHS copy, and the rest of my impressions were probably influenced by the fact that after the entire film, what stayed in my mind were the peculiar transformation scenes and especially the fatally gothic ending. Suddenly, the horrible synthesizers and the insufferable Broderick fall silent, and only the clashing of heavy swords and the impact of hooves on the church pavement echoes in the cathedral. Whereas this almost silent conclusion lasts maybe twenty minutes. Similarly, the tragic figure of the negative bishop, who sold his soul to the Devil because of a morbid consuming love, not because of worldly ambition or anything like that, works here even after all these years. The general enormity of love in this film is respectably functional enough that, by the nature of the plot, it contains a minimum of the usual common conventional scenes of displays of emotion. It's a shame we have to watch it from the position of a beleaguered pickpocket through cheesy and stagy narrative, and that what plays into that plays into it. (02/02/2021)