The Cinematheque

“Nixon’s performance is a self-conscious tour de force of buried fury … The only cinematic comparison is another masterpiece, Naruse Mikio’s A Wanderer’s Notebook, about the life and struggle of Fumiko Hayashi, a Japanese writer who, like Dickinson, died in middle-age.”

A.S. Hamrah, n+1

Of Sunset Song​’s difficult production, Terence Davies said, ​“Every single thing that could go wrong went wrong, I don’t know how we pulled it off. A Quiet Passion was the complete opposite.” The start of a new phase for Davies, Passion reconstructs the personhood and artistry of the poet Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon), not to explain her posthumous fame or lifetime obscurity, but to observe how the writer might have sharpened her piercing voice on the page in the absence of recognition or assurance. Dickinson’s world—mostly confined to and yet continually sparked by encounters within her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts—is one where language is pivotal. How this public speech, as repartee, debate, and recitation, informs Dickinson’s private writings is left to our inference. So much of the film is comedic and beautifully lit that it disguises how, in its scope, Davies returns here to the span of his original Trilogy, from the time of children to the hour of death.

DCP courtesy of Music Box Films

“Splendid … Davies’s earliest films are notably light on dialogue, but this one contains plenty of talk, both bantering and brutal … All the more striking, then, when Davies halts the talk and gives us a suite of images.”

David Bordwell

“Dense and dazzling, rigorous and subtle … The ritualistic stateliness of Florian Hoffmeister’s camerawork is balanced by the bracing speed of Davies’s dialogue.”

Imogen Sara Smith, Film Comment