Cruella review: Emma Stone is a riot in Disney’s wickedly stylish take on the fashion film

It’s a great compliment to the actor that it never feels as if she’s wrestling with Glenn Close’s shadow

Dir: Craig Gillespie. Starring: Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Paul Walter Hauser, Emily Beecham, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Mark Strong. 12A, 134 mins

In 1996, Glenn Close glided onto screens in fur and feathers, with an electric shock of a black-and-white wig perched on her head and a cackle that could summon the dead. Her take on Cruella de Vil, in Disney’s live-action adaptation of its 1961 animated classic 101 Dalmatians, has, for a long time, felt positively definitive. And so, it’s a great compliment to Emma Stone’s performance in Cruella– playing a young, mostly reimagined version of the character – that it never feels as if she’s wrestling with the shadow of her predecessor.

Here, the character’s been transplanted to the Seventies, right as the punk movement raged through the streets of London and came scratching up against the door of the establishment. Stone’s lightly parodic, aristocratic English twang has been borrowed from her Broadway debut as Sally Bowles in the 2014 production of Cabaret. But she dips every one of her lines in champagne and truffles, relishing every “dahling” that passes her lips.

She’s a perfect centrepiece for a film like Cruella. Wickedly stylish and an absolute gas, it’s essentially a fashion film, full of immaculate gowns and unabashed showmanship. Dana Fox and Tony McNamara’s script has “Cruella” simply be a nickname given to Estella’s natural mean streak, which she’s done to well bury as a promise to her kindly (and very dead) mother Catherine (Emily Beecham). It’s a far less aggressive attempt to rehabilitate a villain than 2014’s Maleficent, which poured buckets of tragedy onto Sleeping Beauty’s relatively simple story of a sorceress peeved that she wasn’t invited to a party. Cruella was never good, just in denial.

Director Craig Gillespie is content to pull back and let costume designer Jenny Beavan (who memorably won an Oscar for Mad Max: Fury Road) tell the bulk of the story through her heavenly creations. As Estella grimly scales the fashion industry ladder, she comes up against the ferocious Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson), finding herself both repulsed and enchanted by such a narcissistic genius. Cruella sees a war waged in silk, leather, and lace, with Estella’s DIY aesthetics - her outfits seemingly cobbled together from fabric scraps - pitted against the precise silhouettes of the Baroness’s traditional, Dior-esque fashion house. What we later see from a fully realised Cruella is a mixture of both, in a clever nod to the way Vivienne Westwood, one of the original fashion punks, adopted and subverted fashion history as she gained mainstream success.

And, since the clothes do most of the work, it’s everyone else’s job simply to keep up. Nicholas Britell’s jazzy score is paired with an entire jukebox’s worth of vintage hits - who’d have ever thought that The Stooges’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, thick with sexual overtones, would end up in a Disney film? Gillespie, meanwhile, keeps the film looking slick and elegant, including a nod to Goodfellas’s famous tracking shot through the Copacabana, as the camera winds through the underbelly of London’s Liberty department store.

“Cruella” is simply a nickname given to Estella’s (Emma Stone) natural mean streak, which she’s done to well bury as a promise to her kindly (and very dead) mother

(Laurie Sparham)

Stone’s performance is commanding enough not to be swallowed up by the wigs and costumes, while she sprinkles in a little wounded pride to lend a sense of genuine pathos to Cruella’s madness. But the film belongs equally to her onscreen rival - and Thompson is brilliantly despicable, landing somewhere in between The Devil Wears Prada’s Miranda Priestly and Phantom Thread’s Reynolds Woodcock. The actor keeps Stone on her toes, lest she sweeps the film right from under her. While Joel Fry’s Jasper, Paul Walter Hauser’s Horace, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste’s Anita Darling lend softness and heart to the film, the real pleasure here is watching two formidable comic actors tear into each other while dressed to the nines. Cruella is the most fashionable dogfight of the year.