[In Macbeth, Welles adopted] an expressionistic or subjective mode in which the consciousness of the hero colors the world which we see around him. If one is able to overlook glaring errors in execution, there is a good deal to be learned from watching what Welles has done. Consider, for example, the way in which his camera treats Macbeth. Many of the shots are from waist level, looking up, so that Welles's face seems to tower over the viewer, and, when his hand is extended, it looms grotesquely large as it nears the camera. Many of his lines are spoken as the camera looks elsewhere…. The mind of the speaker, the world around him, and the world we see are all one. That world is like none known on our earth, a castle which is a labyrinth of caves, their walls oozing with watery slime, while outside lies a barren wasteland…. The primitive era suggested by the costumes and by Welles's dirge-like prologue looks back to a time when mankind was emerging from the dark mists of devil worship…. Tricks of lighting …, visual shocks in the cutting and montage, and images of a voodoo doll being formed and then broken as Macbeth traces his fall—all these combine to shape the world in which Macbeth finds himself cabin'd, cribb'd and confin'd.

In this warped, surreal world, Macbeth's visions are not hallucinations, but clairvoyance, a second sight truer than mere physical sight. And thus, his perceptions of the otherworld are validated by the technique of the film—as, conversely, they are invalidated by a realistic technique. In this world too, images and objects have powers which go beyond their literal meaning. At times they set an emotional tone. Usually it is fear—the fear of things unseen in the mist, of entrapment in the caves of Dunsinane, and of the dizzying vertigo induced by strange camera angles, movement, and montage. At other times, they go beyond the emotional to take on conceptual meanings, becoming emblems with abstract significance. On the simplest level, each side in the conflict between good and evil has its emblem; opposed to the Cross is the spiky emblem of the Witches: a thin Y formed by two spines sticking out from a long, thin pole…. Despite Christian symbols—even some bits in Latin from the baptismal rites—we never see anything like the world of justice and heroism which Shakespeare embodies in Duncan and his court, later in Malcolm and the English court. Nor does Welles endow his Lady Macbeth with the force of character which in part must keep us in sympathy with Macbeth as a man misled. Nor, despite the business of the voodoo doll, do Welles's Witches help expose Macbeth's better nature because there is no goodness in him for them to overcome. Welles's Macbeth is a vicious monster from the outset, a grotesque mutation adapted to an unnatural world. Even the great soliloquies of despair, meant to pull us back into sympathy with Macbeth in the final act, ring hollow because there has been nothing good—no honor, love, obedience, nor troops of friends—for this Macbeth to lose. In short, by allowing Macbeth's nightmare vision to control his setting and his cinematic technique, Welles kept much of the play's eerie atmosphere, but almost wholly lost the sense of good and evil warring within a man's soul. (pp. 337-38)