My wife and I were looking for a movie to watch last night and I stumbled upon The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, which is a movie made for Amazon Prime Video. It didn’t look promising until I spotted its star, Benedict Cumberbatch. The movie is about an English artist named Louis Wain, and sure enough my wife remembered her grandmother owning a book of his artwork.

The movie starts after the death of his father, and Louis is now the head of the Wain family. But he’s a strange fellow without stable employment or money skills.

He’s the only boy of the family, leaving him many sisters. With their father gone, he has to look after them. Most of them don’t deserve help.

Then he falls for his sisters’ governess Emily. They get married in a scandal of social class politics but genuinely care for one another.

But things get big for Louis Wain after being inspired by a kitten he adopted, a cat named Peter. Soon enough, his cat pictures make him famous internationally.

I did enjoy the movie, but it’s far from perfect. There’s a few boring parts and I thought it was strange Amazon shot this without a wide-screen option. The movie gets quite sad about halfway through but almost everything is true to history. Except I read his marriage was scandalous because she was ten years older, not because they were of different classes.