There are very few figures who embody the mythology of 1990s London quite like Kate Moss. She arrived during the peak of Cool Britannia not simply as a model, but as a mood: elusive, impossibly chic, permanently photographed yet somehow mysterious.
Unlike today’s celebrities, endlessly available through podcasts and social media confessionals, Moss built her mystique through silence. You saw her everywhere — in Calvin Klein campaigns, on nightclub doorsteps, at Glastonbury in chic wellies and cigarette in hand — but you rarely heard her speak. Interviews were scarce, and when they did appear, they only deepened the sense that she existed slightly outside ordinary celebrity culture. She became less a person than a symbol of a certain British cool: detached, reckless, glamorous and untouchable.
That sense of enigma is precisely what Moss & Freud, from writer-director director James Lucas, struggles to capture. The film, centred on the relationship between Lucian Freud and Moss during the making of his famous Naked Portrait 2002, wants to explore the intimacy between artist and muse, but too often settles for something surprisingly safe and emotionally muted. For a story loaded with tabloid fascination, artistic obsession and generational tension, the film rarely feels dangerous enough.
There is very little doubt that Ellie Bamber is easily the film’s greatest asset. She doesn’t attempt a caricature of Moss, nor does she lean too heavily into imitation. Instead, she captures the strange stillness that made Moss so compelling in the first place: the watchfulness, the emotional distance, the feeling that she is always withholding part of herself from the room.
Derek Jacobi, unfortunately, feels miscast as the iconic artist. He certainly resembles Freud physically, and there are flashes of the right acerbic wit, but the performance sadly never fully convinces. Freud was famously intimidating and severe, someone whose portraits often felt psychologically invasive. Jacobi softens him into a kindly eccentric old age pensioner, draining the character of the intensity that made Freud such a magnetic and controversial figure. Ironically, the far more convincing portrait of a Freudesque artist figure comes from Ian McKellen in The Christophers, whose performance there possesses more authority and complexity than Jacobi manages throughout.
The film also suffers from its own caution, and because Moss herself serves as executive producer, Moss & Freud seems desperate to downplay the rumours and the constant speculation that surrounded the real-life relationship between the two. The result is a strangely sanitised portrait of two notoriously complicated personalities.
There are moments of beauty here, largely thanks to Ellie Bamber’s performance and the film’s recreation of smoky, late-90s West London artistic culture. But for a story involving two of Britain’s most fascinating cultural figures, Moss & Freud never becomes as provocative, mysterious or emotionally revealing as it should have been.
