Leonora Carrington Biopic Blends Surrealism, Feminism, and Historical Invention
A new film about Leonora Carrington is as interested in mythmaking as it is in biography. Leonora in the Morning Light, directed by Thor Klein and Lena Vurma, follows the British Mexican Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) through a deliberately non-linear structure that moves between remembered fact and imaginative reconstruction. The result is a portrait that captures the atmosphere of Carrington’s life, even as it departs from the historical record in significant ways.
The film draws on Elena Poniatowska’s 2011 novel Leonora, written by the 94-year-old French-born Mexican journalist who knew Carrington personally and illustrated many of her books. Yet the title comes from a different source altogether: Michaela Carter’s 2021 fictional account of Carrington’s life. That double inheritance signals the film’s central tension from the outset. It is less a straightforward biopic than a Surrealist collage, one that treats memory as something assembled, revised, and passed from hand to hand.
Leonora in the Morning Light opens in Mexico in 1951, with Olivia Vinall as Carrington visiting Edward James, played by Ryan Gage, the eccentric English patron who collected works by Salvador Dalí and René Magritte and created Las Pozas in the Sierra Gorda rainforest. From there, the film jumps back to 1930s Paris, where Carrington is shown with Max Ernst, portrayed by Alexander Scheer, and declares, “I hide many images away deep inside me, so they won’t discover me. I still don’t know what I am.”
The film is strongest when it stages Carrington’s resistance to the Surrealist habit of turning women into symbols. In one scene, André Breton, played by Denis Eyriey, praises the “woman-child” as the movement’s ideal conduit to the unconscious. Salvador Dalí, portrayed by Cat Jugravu, echoes the sentiment. Carrington pushes back, calling the idea of women as muses “absurd” and pointing out that the men who romanticize them still expect women to do the domestic labor.
But the film’s liberties become more troubling when it turns to Carrington’s wartime trauma. It depicts Ernst’s arrest as the cause of her breakdown, though the historical sequence was different: Ernst was released quickly after intervention from influential friends, then later arrested again by the Nazis. Carrington was institutionalized in Spain after being found in Madrid, where she had been gang raped by Francoist soldiers — a fact the film does not include. In Santander, she underwent electroshock therapy and injections of a drug that caused seizures.
The film later returns Carrington to Mexico, where she is shown recalling her aristocratic English childhood, identifying with animals, and insisting that she is a horse. That instinct for metamorphosis is central to Carrington’s art, and to the film’s appeal. Now screening in Dublin and throughout England and Scotland, Leonora in the Morning Light offers a visually rich but uneven meditation on how a life can be translated into cinema without losing its fractures.
