The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
Short description
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain tells the story of Louis Wain, an eccentric British artist working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The eldest of six children, he takes on the responsibility of supporting his mother and sisters after his father dies, and earns a living as an illustrator. Two things reshape his life: his love for Emily, the governess of his sisters, and a stray kitten named Peter. Cats become both his family and the subject of his art, and his whimsical, often anthropomorphic drawings of them change how the public sees the animals. As his distinctive inner world grows more vivid, it increasingly takes the place of everyday reality.
Will Sharpe directs and co-wrote the screenplay with Simon Stephenson. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Louis Wain, with Claire Foy as Emily, and Andrea Riseborough, Toby Jones, Sharon Rooney and Aimee Lou Wood among the supporting cast. The production was a British effort involving Film4 Productions, Shoebox Films, StudioCanal and SunnyMarch.
The film runs 111 minutes and mixes comedy and drama with historical elements. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.8 from around 24,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.9 from roughly 552 votes. A critics' rating of 6.4 from 157 reviews places it somewhat below the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- In North America, the film had a limited release, and after a couple of weeks transitioned to streaming services, but in the United Kingdom and some other countries, it was released nationally in January 2022, with a streaming premiere occurring only five weeks later.
- The film claims that before Louis Wain, cats were not kept as pets in Great Britain, however, this is a false statement. Both in the 19th century and before, many prominent figures openly stated that they kept a cat or cats at home. Among them were, in particular, the poet and artist Edward Lear, the writer Emily Brontë, the writer Horace Walpole, the social activist Florence Nightingale, the poet Robert Southey, and Her Majesty Queen Victoria.
- The film was shot with an unusual 4:3 aspect ratio for modern cinema. This ratio was standard until the 1950s, when widescreen formats began to dominate.
- The words "cat" and "female cat" are used 64 times in the film.
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