Juliet wakes from a fever dream. How did we get here? That question drives These Violent Delights, Scottish Ballet’s first feature-length film, a wordless, contemporary reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy that treats the story everyone knows as a memory slipping through its heroine’s fingers.
Directed by Christopher Hampson and Oscar Sansom, it is not a filmed stage show but a true piece of cinema, fierce, athletic and unsettling, and one of the most exciting dance films in years.
These Violent Delights strips Romeo and Juliet of words and finds something wilder underneath.
Movie at a Glance
- UK and Ireland cinemas: From Wednesday 21 October 2026 (limited), with a recorded Q&A
- UK distributor: Tull Stories
- US release: No US release has been announced yet
- Directors: Christopher Hampson and Oscar Sansom
- Starring: Kayla-Maree Tarantolo and Ishan Mahabir-Stokes, with the dancers of Scottish Ballet
- Runtime: 70 minutes
- UK certificate: 15
- Language: No dialogue
- Genre: Dance film
Viewer Match
- Best for: Dance lovers, Shakespeare fans open to radical reinvention and anyone curious about bold, experimental cinema.
- Maybe skip if: You want a traditional, romantic Romeo and Juliet with a balcony scene.
- Mood and pace: Feverish, dreamlike and intense, compressed into a tight 70 minutes.
- Cinema or streaming? Cinema, absolutely: the choreography and design demand a big screen.
- Spoiler level: Spoiler-free, though the famous tragedy is no secret.
Juliet’s Story
This is Juliet’s film. We experience the story through her disoriented, fevered memory as she tries to reconstruct the days that brought her to the brink. She is lonely and suffocated within her family, pushed towards a marriage she does not want, and haunted by visions of the young man she believes destiny has chosen for her.
Kayla-Maree Tarantolo is magnificent in the role, firmly of the twenty-first century in attitude and movement, conveying confusion, curiosity, desire and defiance without a single word. Ishan Mahabir-Stokes gives Romeo a layered, heartbreaking vulnerability, and the wider company makes every character, however briefly seen, feel fully drawn.
Out on the Dancefloor
The film’s boldest stroke is to replace the balcony scene with a night at a club called the Apothecary, a blaze of queer, drag-inflected, drug-fuelled energy presided over by a reimagined Sister Laurence. It is a dazzling sequence, humming with nervous euphoria, and it captures the recklessness of youth better than any amount of verse.
Remarkably, the choreography is shared between several choreographers, each assigned to different characters, yet it flows seamlessly. Juliet’s spiky, troubled movement softens with love and friendship; the Capulets are brash and brittle; a ghostly chorus of shadows embodies Juliet’s subconscious.
A World Designed to Unravel
Production designer Sami Fendall creates opulent worlds for the warring families, all rich trimmings and gilded excess, before stripping them away in a scuzzy warehouse nightclub where the costumes take over. The photography is restless and hallucinatory, with doors that never lead where you expect, fast edits between memory and reality, and unusual lenses that heighten the dreamlike mood.
Occasionally the stylisation and editing can feel a touch tricksy, and the darkness of this reading, which offers few moments of pure, uncomplicated love, will not suit everyone. But this is a deliberate, coherent vision about alienation and the brevity of youth, performed with total commitment.
Ballet for the Big Screen
Anyone who thinks ballet belongs only behind a proscenium arch should see this. These Violent Delights uses cinema’s tools to tell an old story in a thrillingly new way, and it secures Scottish Ballet’s place at the cutting edge of dance on film.
Spoiler-Free Verdict
These Violent Delights is a bold, thrilling and beautifully danced reinvention of Shakespeare, led by a superb Kayla-Maree Tarantolo and designed to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
- Performances: 9/10
- Direction: 8.5/10
- Screenplay: 8/10
- Score: 8/10
- Cinematography: 8.5/10
- Entertainment Value: 8/10
- Overall score: 8.5/10
Star rating: 4/5
Verdict badge: Worth Seeing
One-line verdict: A fierce, feverish dance film that makes Romeo and Juliet feel dangerous again.
Watch the Official Trailer
Enter Juliet’s fever dream in the official UK and Irish trailer.
Which Shakespeare adaptation has surprised you most? Tell us your spoiler-free thoughts on These Violent Delights.