Czech Republic on the eve of World War II. The Nazi soldiers are preparing for the annexation of the area. Karel Kopfrkingl is a manager of a local crematorium, which needs 75 minutes to incinerate a corpse in a coffin. He is obssesed with the Dalai Lama and believes that by cremating people, their souls are helped into leaving the world of suffering and reincarnating someplace else. With the Nazi takeover, he slowly starts accepting their ideology. His wife Lakme is a Jew, so he hangs her. He thinks his son Mili is secretly gay, so he kills him with a bat in the morgue. When he brings his daughter Zina to assail her, she escapes, while he is lost in the sea of halucinations, as he is taken away in a car.
Filmed in classic Czech style, "The Cremator" is a subtly dark allegory on the Holocaust, so strange that it is difficult to categorize it. The director Juraj Herz crafted a meticulously framed film, assembling unusual shot compositions (wide-angle lens, frog perspective, double exposition, telephoto lens, geometrical symmetry) to make even conventional scenes look extraordinary thanks to his visual style. At its core, the story's theme is the slow descend from rationalism into fundamentalism without the main anti-hero Karel (a great Rudolf Hrusinsky) noticing it, a cremator obssessed with death, who thinks that killing someone "imperfect" is liberating that person from suffering, only to in the end reach a point where he "whitewashes" every crime as something normal and ineviateble. You get chills watching this: one can rarely see such a tranquilly horrifying film. However, Karel's overlong monologues tend to get a little ponderous in the first half, since it takes almost an hour into the film until the plot starts to set in, whereas the abrupt end leaves something to be desired. One great cinematically playful sequence involves Karel making a list of people who are pontentially dangerous at a party, and each time he mentions a name ("Zajic, Fenek, Beran, Podzimkova...") a quick clip is inserted in which the said person turns around and looks into the camera, as if angry that his or her name is mentioned. Another one has Karel imagining talking to himself dressed up as a Dalai Lama, and there is a scary moment in which he is chasing after his daughter among the coffins in the morgue, filmmed in a wide lens. "The Cremator" is a disturbing and morbid depiction of how people can become madmen when they lose any kind of review process or critical thinking.
Grade:+++
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