Film

Jubilee

Name: Jubilee
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Music
Released: 1978
Cast: Jenny Runacre, Nell Campbell, Toyah Willcox, Pamela Rooke, Ian Charleson

Satire
Strange

Derek Jarman's 1978 punk fever dream sends Queen Elizabeth I into a neon-soaked 1970s wasteland of gang violence, squats, and glam rock. Part political allegory, part visual riot, it's hypnotic and bewildering—a film that feels more like a transmission from another planet than a conventional narrative. For adventurous viewers hungry for cinema that doesn't apologize.

TMDb rating

3.0

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love punk as a snarling, anarchic collage, where energy and satirical bite count for more than neat plotting, and you enjoy being jolted by a film that treats history like a rowdy sketch.

Skip it if you want a tidy, linear story or a polished production; it's rough, episodic and scrappy, and its loud, deliberately abrasive style can wear thin over its running time.

What it asks of you: Expect a loose, episodic shape at just under two hours, with scenes that lurch rather than build, and it needs you to keep up with its noise and fragments.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

A Clockwork Orange1971

Another future-shock parable about youth violence and societal collapse, gorgeously composed and viciously funny. Both films believe dystopia is cinema-ready and gorgeous. Kubrick's precision to Jarman's chaos.

But It's been everywhere and everyone knows it. Also much more controlled than Jubilee—less punk spirit, more surgical coldness.

Performance.1970

Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell's hallucinogenic collision of gangster and rock star, identity dissolving in a London townhouse. Same era, same gender-bending sexuality, same refusal to make narrative sense if mood matters more.

But Slower and considerably more cryptic. The experimental ambition is the point, and that requires patience some evenings don't have.

Tank Girl1995

Nineties punk-aesthetic action film that wears Jubilee's influence proudly—anarchic visuals, comic-strip logic, a refusal to be respectable. Pure fun where Jubilee is more mirror-held-to-your-face.

But It's frothy and sometimes silly in ways that diffuse the message. Fun can feel lighter than you want after Jarman's intensity.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Jubilee

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle1980

Both films use punk and its visual language as their native language; both made within three years of punk's combustion. They're siblings arguing about what it all meant.

Russ Meyer and Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren's anarchic documentary-fiction hybrid about punk's manufactured chaos and collapse. It's Jarman's peer, made by the other side of the same war, using similar collage techniques to opposite political ends. Essential context.

But Messily made and structurally all over the place. Some will call it brilliant, others a self-important mess. The sex and violence are explicit and the politics are deliberately provocative.

Berserk: The Golden Age Arc II - The Battle for Doldrey2012

Anime epic with medieval desolation, graphic violence, and characters ground to nothing by fate. Dark and visually daring in ways most mainstream cinema won't touch. Different medium, same refusal of comfort.

But Animated, and very long. The violence is extreme and genuinely upsetting. Not a light evening regardless of format.

Berserk: The Golden Age Arc II - The Battle for Doldrey poster

Under the Skin2014

Jonathan Glazel's slow-burn science fiction uses landscape and mood the way Jarman does—image and atmosphere over plot. Alien predation wrapped in mystery and gorgeous cinematography. Patient, hypnotic, utterly strange.

But Glacially paced. If you need a story to hold you, this will feel like watching paint dry. Comprehension is not the goal.

if....1968

Lindsay Anderson's surrealist attack on British institutions through a boarding school rebellion. Mixing documentary realism with fantasy and violence, it invented several of Jarman's techniques. The grandfather text.

But Black and white, considerably older, and the surrealism is more restrained. Less immediate kinetic energy, more intellectual anger.

Liquid Sky1982

Soviet underground sci-fi about a UFO visiting 1980s New York, filmed on a budget of nothing with punk aesthetics and synth music. Shares Jubilee's low-fi DIY rebellion and gender-bending nightclub energy. A sister text.

But Even lower budget than Jubilee and the acting is often wooden. The charm is partly its strangeness; that's not for every viewer.

Stalker1979

Tarkovsky's meditative sci-fi journey through a mysterious zone. Polar opposite in pacing and philosophy but equally committed to cinema as pure image and mood over narrative convenience. Proves there's more than one way to be visionary.

But Slow in a way that requires genuine surrender. Nearly three hours and almost nothing happens in any conventional sense. Patience isn't negotiable.

Mulholland Drive2001

Both treat cinema as a space where psychological rather than narrative logic rules. Both use genre trappings as a vehicle for exploring the fragmentation of identity and reality. Both demand you surrender to feeling rather than comprehension.

David Lynch's Hollywood fever dream where identity collapses, narrative splinters, and you can't trust what you're watching. It has Jubilee's commitment to emotional truth over logic, its willingness to wreck linear storytelling, its insistence that cinema can be a direct transmission to the unconscious.

But Three hours of mounting dread and unreliable perspective. The second half deliberately contradicts the first. If you need to understand what happened, you will be frustrated.