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Cremator" is a re-release of Czech director
Juraj Herz's unsettling 1968 effort about a deeply
macabre man who slowly becomes a monster. The film
has been enjoying somewhat of a revival of late,
having been screened at a number of festivals, and
even though it is now nearly forty years old, it
has lost little of its power to chill.
Based on a novel by Ladislav
Fuks, the film is set in
Prague
during the Nazi occupation, and follows Karl
Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrusinsky), a man who works in
a massive, ornate crematorium. Kopfrkingl is
obsessed with his work, believing death to be a
release from the suffering of life, and that by
incinerating corpses he is in fact liberating
souls. The coming of the Nazis pushes his
eccentricity into madness, perverting his already
twisted ambitions and offering him the opportunity
to live out his fantasies in horrifying fashion.
Kopfrkingl takes to the Nazi ideal with
frightening ease, gradually perverting his own
beliefs as he comes to view himself as a saviour
of mankind, at great cost to those around him,
particularly his family.
"The Cremator" is
not a horror film in the traditional sense, but is
a darkly ironic and bleakly satirical comedy.
Although there is little in the way of laughs, it
is grotesquely humorous throughout, mainly through
the lead character's unfailing preoccupation with
death. Particularly funny are his visions of the
Dalai Lama, and his self-serving justifications
for his own moral degeneration. Herz also plays
some of the supporting cast for comedy, including
a couple who turn up several times during scenes
of death or violence, only to comment that they
are too horrible to watch and run away. Despite
such ludicrous undertones, the film is bleak and
sombre throughout, with a stately pace that aptly
resembles that of a funerary march.
The film is held together by
Rudolf Hrusinsky's excellent performance in the
lead role, for which he deservedly received an
award for best actor at the 1972 Stiges Film
Festival. He exudes a quiet monstrousness, from
his initially harmless and amusing morbidity, to
the violent psychosis which he succumbs to during
the latter stages of the film. His gradual and
indeed horribly logical development into a fiend
is wholly believable, and as such the film works
wonderfully as a bleak character study and an
insight into the mind of a man who would go on to
commit atrocities through a deranged sense of
compassion.
Herz's direction has an
expressionist feel, shot in black and white with a
striking use of shadow and marked gothic
sensibility. The film is very much seen through
Kopfrkingl's eyes, and as such, the city is given
the look of a tomb, with the crematorium
resembling the grand temple of death which he
imagines it to be. This does mean that the
proceedings do at times slip into the realm of the
surreal, though this is skilfully done and works
well as a method of illustrating both the
character and the country's decent into madness,
giving the atmosphere that of an inescapable
nightmare.
"The Cremator" is a
unique example of modern gothic cinema, being both
fantastic and grimly realistic. Finding comedy in
the darkest recesses of the human spirit, Herz has
produced a film which is genuinely chilling and
filled with a sense of ominous dread. As such, it
is horror of the purest kind, and is a sinister
gem which deserves rediscovery.
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