Wild horses

Equus

Dir Sidney Lumet, UK 1977 BFI, £22.99 (Blu-ray)

truly is a strange beast. Dr Martin Dysart (Richard Burton) is a psychiatrist working with disturbed children. Teenager Alan Strang (Peter Firth) has blinded six horses with a sickle; slowly Dysart pieces together Alan’s story. He replaced the Christian god of his fundamentalist mother with a created horse deity, Equus. He found a weekend job at a stables, identifying with the horses, holding a leg bent, pawing the ground. He began riding the horses at night, bareback and naked, calling out a chant culminating in “I want to be inside you, and be you, forever one person,” as he climaxed. When a teenage girl working at the stables, Jill Mason (Jenny Agutter) seduces