This Movie Is A Masterpiece
I confess I didn't like it when I first saw it. Nothing seemed to be happening. Or rather lots of things seemed to be happening, but none of them connected with each other. But that is part of its brilliance. There are no flashy visuals, no attention-getting camera moves: just a steady, intense pitiless glare at these characters as they move around each other and, in some cases, destroy each other.
For the person who was confused by the brutal game of British Bulldog that Michael York and his friends play: this will not surprise once if you understand the English public school. York's character is a product of public school and so is used to cheerful mindless violence. He lives in a great baronial hall, and all he is interested in is ritualised aggression: it sums up the English upper class rather well.
The dialogue is like most dialogue that people speak: to mask what they are saying, not to explain it. Most movies spell out their characters emotions because they are too damn lazy to dramatise them. In this film it is all there beneath the surface. This movie came from an age when there were things beneath the surface.
Like watching paint dry? Paint on a Monet, maybe.