Angels and Insects

Angels and Insects (1995) — watch online on iFILM. Philip Haas adapted A.S. Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia for this British period drama starring Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Naturalist William Adamson returns from years in the Amazon with nothing — his specimens and collection lost at sea. Sir Harald Alabaster, a wealthy Victorian patriarch and keen entomologist, takes Adamson into his household to work on the family archive. Alabaster's daughter Eugenia is beautiful and soon becomes William's wife. Children arrive quickly. The house runs on an established order. Everything looks fine.

But the Alabaster manor has arrangements that predate William's arrival. As he studies insect colonies — their hierarchies, their dependencies, what the hive conceals beneath its surface — Matty Chapell (Kristin Scott Thomas), sharp, quiet, and his co-author on a natural history study, sees things William doesn't. Byatt built the entomology as the story's structural metaphor, and Haas keeps it intact: the film's slow revelation works because William's scientific training keeps him looking at the wrong specimens. Stream Angels and Insects (1995) on iFILM.