Agony
- heavy
- intense
- bleak
Heavy, steady, extreme drama / historical, inventive in texture. Nihilistic, epic, cold, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →As an adviser to the emperor Nicholas II, mystic Grigori Rasputin holds great influence over the empire. However, many in St Petersburg begin to regard Rasputin, with his strange practices and mesmerizing qualities, as a liability and plot his assassination. When Rasputin, known to many as the 'Mad Monk', leads Nicholas to embrace an ill-conceived military strategy, a group of determined conspirators set down a plan to eliminate him.
Our read · Agony (1981) reads as a heavy, steady, inventive drama · historical entry — extreme in intensity, epic-stakes in scope, cold in temperature, nihilistic in outlook, with a strong directorial signature. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of Agony
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a feverish Soviet biopic of Rasputin and the last days of empire.”
Skip it tonight — You want tight plotting or avoid sexual excess in historical drama.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
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