Prospero’s Books

Let’s talk about Prospero’s Books, Peter Greenaway’s 1991 fever dream of a sci-fi-tinged Shakespeare adaptation. Yeah, it’s technically The Tempest, but through some kind of avant-garde filter, dressed in surreal visuals and digital effects that felt way ahead of their time. I first stumbled onto it late one night on a streaming service when I’d really just wanted something weird. On that count, it absolutely delivered.

Greenaway is one of those directors who never met a convention he didn’t want to throw out the window. Here, Prospero (played by the ever-grand John Gielgud) isn’t just a character — he’s a writer, a director, a god of the film’s world. The movie’s full of visual layers: text on the screen, animated collage, bodies moving like living sculptures. Sometimes it’s genuinely beautiful, sometimes it’s just exhausting. There are points when you feel like you’re being attacked by a medieval tapestry in HD.

The sci-fi energy in this isn’t traditional spaceships-and-aliens stuff. Instead, it’s in the way Greenaway edits — the reality-hopping, digital layering, and the almost VR-like sense that you’re unmoored from time and space. For 1991, it really does feel out of the future. The way “the books” become literal artifacts of magic and knowledge felt kind of like proto-cyberpunk: it’s obsessed with information overload, the power of the archive, and even has early digital manipulation that seems uncanny now.

Performances, though, are very much a mixed bag. Gielgud carries the movie with this poised, melancholy gravity but the rest of the cast almost gets lost in the clutter, especially as the film becomes more visually overwhelming. Isabelle Pasco is delicate and strange as Miranda, but the script doesn’t care much for the secondary characters. Sometimes you want to reach in and rescue the actors from the noise and nudity.

Speaking of nudity — yes, there’s a lot, and it’s treated with the same matter-of-fact theatricality as the rest of Greenaway’s work. It’s not erotic, just ever-present, almost classical. Same goes for the score by Michael Nyman, which pulses and swirls and sometimes drowns everything else out. There are stretches that are so dense with movement and sound that real narrative basically falls away. You’re just left tumbling through a visual sonata.

Thing is, for all its ambition, Prospero’s Books can get terminally pretentious. The lines between profound and overblown blur early, and by the two-hour mark, it’s very easy to disengage — the movie’s more interested in its own ideas than it is in its audience. Pacing is glacial, especially if you’re craving story. The emotional core is so buried that even the rare moments of vulnerability (like Prospero’s brief flashes of loneliness or rage) get swept up in the visual static.

But that’s also weirdly the point. Greenaway isn’t asking you to follow along so much as swim in it — to experience the movie as some kind of dream or memory or data stream. Sometimes that’s frustrating, especially when you’re not feeling patient, but on the right night, it can be hypnotic. I kept thinking about other films that worship visuals over clarity, like the more opaque works of Terry Gilliam or even Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, but this one’s thornier.

So: is it good? On a technical level, definitely. On a storytelling or human level, it’s far less approachable. I respect the hell out of the movie’s nerve, I just can’t pretend I always loved watching it. If you’re up for something more like an art installation than a conventional sci-fi film — or if you want to see digital editing before it was remotely cool — Prospero’s Books is probably for you. Otherwise, your mileage will seriously vary.