Corsage

Corsage (2022) is an Austrian-German historical drama — watch it online on iFILM. Directed by Marie Kreutzer and starring Vicki Krieps, it follows Empress Elisabeth of Austria through the year she turned forty and was officially declared, by the standards of the Habsburg court, an old woman.

Christmas Eve 1877. Elisabeth starves herself to keep a 16-inch waist, dodges cameras, and engineers small rebellions against a world that wants to freeze her image in amber. Her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister), barely registers the quiet war she's waging. Kreutzer deliberately breaks the period-drama frame — contemporary music, deliberate anachronisms — because this isn't a costume pageant; it's a film about what happens when a woman refuses to be a symbol.

Krieps took home the Best Performance prize at Cannes 2022, and it's easy to see why: she strips out every trace of the fairy-tale princess and plays someone genuinely dangerous to the order around her. Stream Corsage (2022) online on iFILM.