This is Liv Ullmann’s first directing credit since the Bergman-scripted Faithless (2000); now she has adapted Strindberg’s Miss Julie, transplanting the action from late-19th-century Sweden to County Fermanagh of roughly the same period. It’s a fervent, cerebral, unashamedly intense movie, at times hammy, at others serious. Even its flaws arise from a refreshing high-mindedness. Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell throw themselves into their roles, turning the dials up to 11: with mixed but interesting results. The planes, contours and angles of Chastain’s face are revealed with a new closeup severity in the role of Julie. She is the bored, pampered daughter of a grand house with a dangerous below-stairs tendresse for her father’s valet John (Colin Farrell), who has an unspoken understanding with the homely cook Kathleen, a rather thankless role for Samantha Morton.

Julie teases, taunts and flirts: John is partly excited and partly enraged at being trifled with by a member of the ruling classes: his own sexual desire is mingled with hate and self-hate. Modern audiences might be willing them to run off together like Lady Sybil and Tom Branson in Downton Abbey, but that is not how things work in Strindberg. It occasionally looks too theatrical and the scene with Julie’s canary might remind you of Oscar Wilde’s lines about Little Nell. Yet there is passion. Julie and John’s highly charged choreography looks like the erotic role play of sub and dom. It is actually a dance of death.