The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

It's an effervescent movie, one that reflects the colourful whimsy of Wain's work and a far more vivid image of Victorian and Edwardian England than your usual period film.

There is rarely a dull moment in this colourful film.

Too often The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain favours eccentricity over actual insight. But even when the tones jar, Cumberbatch's vulnerable, layered performance always rings true.

Sherlock Strangely-Turing is back again for this puzzling, sometimes charming, sometimes infuriating study of the whimsical English artist Louis Wain.

Under the kitsch is something more rewarding: an affecting portrait of a creative but troubled man.

A busy visual style and a bloody-minded commitment to one-note performances are the most notable elements of this misfired biopic about the Victorian artist and illustrator Louis Wain.

A biopic that offers a finely tuned performance from Benedict Cumberbatch, but that, apart from some visual constructions, becomes boring and a little redundant. [Full review in Spanish]

The more “Electrical Life” goes on, the more buried it becomes, sometimes literally, under a sea of quirk rather than delving into just how far Wain fell and how his vulnerability left him exploited.

An overdose of whimsy that’s focus is often distracted like a cat chasing a laser.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is not quite what you expect from a 20th-century biopic. For all of its morose almost Dickensian undertones, it is filled with the whimsical, brightly colored, and an almost psychedelic world that Wain saw around him.