“Your innocence, Mr. Neville, is always sinister.”

Given his background as an artist, it’s no surprise that director Peter Greenaway would focus on the subject as a source for his movies.  Twenty five years apart, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and Nightwatching (2007) are mirror images of each other, each focusing on an artist who smuggles clues into their work in order to expose a conspiracy. The former features a fictional draughtsman, Neville, who is commissioned to draw views of a house on behalf of an absent husband. The latter focuses on the creation and impact of Rembrandt’s work The Night Watch, a painting that Greenaway posits points towards a conspiracy following a murder within a Musketeer regiment.

An attraction of these films, particularly The Draughtsman’s Contract is in the detail of the artwork, and the attention Greenaway places on it. In the earlier film, we watch the evolution of the drawings, balanced by the earthy machinations of the conspirators and the cynical manipulation of Neville. It’s a dry film, formal and austere, framed with a precision that recalls the drawings themselves. Likewise, every frame of Nightwatching resembles a Rembrandt painting: shadowed, posed, theatrical. The latter film is possibly too theatrical to make it as successful as the former – Greenaway, throughout his career, became ever more abstract and stagy in his films. The Draughtsman’s Contract gains points thanks to a lush location and a period soundtrack – it nestles its subversive and surprising narrative within a superficial framework of heritage gloss, and this is undeniably enticing. Nightwatching doesn’t quite have that attractiveness to offset the darkness, so that when you move through the stages of Rembrandt’s life (ironically ordered as birth, death and sex) you feel dragged down by it instead of uplifted.

Both films are full of surprises, notably a living statue in The Draughtsman’s Contract who acts as a kind of Shakespearean fool, cracking the pompous tension of the main plot. The surprises in Nightwatching mostly feature in the dialogue, with a sweary, modern and angry edge.

Both films are worth watching, and worth watching together – but if you only have the time and energy for one – go for The Draughtsman’s Contract. And then watch The Favourite (2019).