Culture

REVIEW: Negatives (1968)

Long before Glenda Jackson became a queer icon, she made her film debut in this strange, overlooked gem from 1968. Her screen debut was in one of the more daring films British cinema produced during that decade.

Hello, cinema lovers! Long before Glenda Jackson became a queer icon, she made her film debut in this strange, overlooked gem from 1968. Her screen debut was in one of the more daring films British cinema produced during that decade. Negatives is not comfortable viewing. It is, however, exactly the kind of film that deserves a queer audience.

Theo (Peter McEnery) and Vivien (Glenda Jackson) are a couple held together not by love but by role play. He plays Dr Crippen, the infamous murderer. She rotates between playing his wife, Belle, and his mistress, Ethel, sometimes within the same scene. Into this arrangement arrives Reingard (Diane Cilento), an icy German photographer who moves into their flat and pushes Theo toward a new obsession: World War I fighter ace the Red Baron. Everything falls apart from there.

What makes Negatives so queer is its sensibility, even if it never says so directly. Its main theme is identity as performance. Nobody here is who they are supposed to be. Theo, played with blankness by McEnery, is a man so hollowed out by role-play that he has no joy left in him.

He takes the submissive role in the sex games, dresses as Crippen, and is undermined at every turn. McEnery had previously appeared in Victim (1961), one of British cinema's first portrayals of a gay man being blackmailed, and there is a similar tone here and queer audiences at the time would have taken note.

Jackson was raw and unhinged in her film debut. She plays Vivien as a total monster and does so without any apology. She would go on to win two Academy Awards (Women in Love; A Touch of Class) in a spectacular career. Here in an early role, she is wild and crazy, a woman who controls the fantasy world she's created. Vivien moves between different personas angrily; she can see the whole performance as silly and hates being part of it.

Reingard, however, is the most queer figure in the film. Cilento, best known at the time as Sean Connery's wife (he was a regular visitor on set), plays her as total mystery. She's a woman who enters a closed straight dynamic, forms a connection with both Theo and Vivien, and happily takes apart the whole arrangement. Why she does this is never explained. She simply arrives, disrupts, and destroys. In queer terms, she is the outsider who refuses to buy into the fantasy others need to survive.

Director Peter Medak, who would later make The Changeling (1980) and The Krays (1990), shows a slower pace that will test some viewers. The film has a solid but odd atmosphere throughout. The waxwork museum sequence, the seedy role-play scenes, Theo tinkering with his plane in the garden, the violent final act. Medak's later fascination with real-life killers and the violence buried inside ordinary people is already visible here.

Age-restricted trailer available

Negatives is a flawed film. The pacing is slow, and the characters are designed to be cold-hearted. But as a film about self, sex, power and the way fantasy becomes a cage, it holds up well. Seen through a queer eye as a film about people who cannot live in the roles society gives them, it holds up even better.

Worth your time. Uneasy, intelligent, and quietly radical.

Featuring a new 4K restoration and various DVD extras include audio commentary, interviews with the cast and crew and a featurette on notorious murderer Dr Crippen.

💡

Negatives (1968) is released on 16 March 2026 on Blu-ray by BFI Flipside.