Using nonlinear narrative technique, it tells of the relationship between the 19th-century artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Oliver Reed) and his model, Elizabeth Siddal.

[1] The exhumation of Lizzie Siddal's desiccated body is seen, followed by a shot of Rossetti dancing among the flames of a bonfire of paintings by Reynolds and Gainsborough.

Some years later, Charles Augustus Howell persuades him to dig the poems up but Rossetti is haunted by the image of the dead Lizzie and becomes addicted to chloral.

Russell had made an earlier film for television about the Pre-Raphaelites called Old Battersea House (1961), the success of which had drawn attention to the then-unfashionable art.

[2] Russell cast many of his friends and used amateur actors, including the pop artist Derek Boshier as Millais and the poet Christopher Logue as Swinburne.

Russell's biographer Joseph Lanza takes the view that its moody black-and-white photography makes the locations in the English Lake District seem like Dracula's Transylvania.

knows a hawk from a handsaw...Russell concentrates on what he sees as the central conflict of Rossetti's life – the discrepancy between his ideals of truth, chivalry, and beauty which form the basis of his exalted vision of womanhood and what simply might be called his highly sexed nature.

This emphasis, in turn, reveals Rossetti's neurotic characteristics of repetitive, obsessional thoughts and feelings and further assists to justify the film's structure since the content, to some degree, dictates the form.