The title is less of a mystery when you realise that corsage in French also means bodice, or girdle. So it works as the name of a film about the gilded cage that stifled Elisabeth, the Hungarian Empress of Austria from 1854 to 1898, even if it risks something in translation.

“You should go to him sans corsage,” Elisabeth (Vicky Krieps) instructs the very young woman who she is arranging to bed the Emperor, Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister), her cold and disenchanted husband.

There have been half a dozen films dating back to the 1930s about Elisabeth, known as Sisi, and just in the past couple of years two television series, Sisi (SBS On Demand) and The Empress (Netflix). This fascination, based on history, is with her reputation as a rebellious aristocrat looking for ways to escape the rigid protocols of the Habsburg court.

This new version from Austrian director Marie Kreutzer offers a far more nuanced and complex Sisi, who is often depicted as childish, irrepressible and disobedient. This portrait sits in company with films like The Favourite, about Queen Anne, which are based on fact, yet are far from what we know as period drama.

Corsage has a modern overlay and a fresh sensibility, so a court musician on his fiddle suddenly starts a baroque version of “As Tears Go By”. In fact, the music from Camille, most of it original, is part of the film’s strange richness.

Mostly, it is a triumph for Krieps, a great actor in the making who brings hurt intelligence to this portrayal of a revered Empress turning 40 who is conflicted about the shallow ornamental role she is required to play, and her own hunger for adoration.

She wants her girdle laced ever tighter – Krieps wore it during filming to experience the restrictions – to show off her tiny waist. She is also, we slowly realise, a woman with an eating disorder who dines on clear consommé and for lunch has a few slices of orange.

There is a strong feminist undertone running through this. She visits wounded soldiers and tries to discuss the war’s casualty count with her husband, only to be lectured about her position. She is there to represent, not to rule. Defeated, she lies down in bed next to a wounded soldier and smokes a gold-tipped Russian cigarette.

Krieps’ Sisi is wayward but not frivolous. She is a passionate and depressed woman trapped in a life without meaning. She rides side-saddle with consummate grace and is devastated when her horse throws her and has to be put down. She flirts with her riding instructor, who understands Sisi’s hunger to be admired, and attempts a liaison with a cousin, who prefers the stable boys.

It is magnificently filmed with rapturous scenes of the Bavarian countryside and Krieps in a series of exquisite cloaks and gowns; delicate bird feathers springing up around her neck, a black lace mask at dinner, tasselled fringes and ermine embellishments. The buildings at her sister’s estate are splendid yet the paint is peeling, and at the palace the plaster crumbles from the walls.

Krieps, who lives in Berlin and acts in German, French, English and now Hungarian, has a history of playing elegantly deranged women, starting with her breakthrough role in Phantom Thread, where she was the muse of couturier Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis). Even as Sisi unravels, shooting up heroin inside the palace and sending her attendant out in her place, she brings melancholic coolness and control to a role tinged with madness.

Corsage opens in cinemas on February 9.