The Elephant Man

Date:: from 1 Dec 2025

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Place:: Cinema

Age restrictions: 18+

David Lynch reveals the ugliness of morality through shocking otherness.

The Elephant Man
1980, David Lynch

United States–United Kingdom
123 minutes, English with Russian subtitles

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft

The film is based on the memoirs of a British doctor from the early 20th century. Joseph Merrick, nicknamed the Elephant Man for his monstrous, repulsive appearance, performs in Mr Bytes’ freak show. Dr. Treves shelters Merrick in the hospital in order to thoroughly understand the Elephant Man’s physiology, but also to understand his psyche. Bytes cannot accept the loss of his star attraction. In this tense struggle between two people obsessed with their own interests, is there room for an deformed, strange, vulnerable man?

Shot from The Elephant Man, 1980

It has to be said that Lynch’s Elephant Man, while not exactly sentimental, takes a determinedly un-alienated attitude to Merrick’s image: rational, compassionate and very different from his approach to what might be called body-nonconformity in Eraserhead in which the keynote is clearly one of horror.

—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

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