It takes approximately 90 minutes to reduce a human body to a pile of ash, a fact that portly crematorium operator Kopfrkingl enjoys sharing, along with his belief that cremation relieves earthly suffering and sends the soul to Heaven much faster than a standard burial. Kopfrkingl has the perfect life: a job he loves, a beautiful and faithful wife and two lovely, intelligent children. His income allows him to surround his family with art and beauty and their lives flow along with the graceful fluidity of a perfect dream. There’s nothing more Kopfrkingl could want from life…or is there?
When an old WWI buddy named Reineke comes back into Kopfrkingl’s life, we see the first cracks in the veneer. Kopfrkingl – a regular at a local brothel – is not the pristine soul he claims to be, and may be suffering from syphillis as a direct result of his philandering. Reineke’s insistence that his war buddy’s pure Czech blood surely contains a drop of German only widens the hairline fractures in Kopfrkingl’s sanity. As the shadow of the rising Nazi Party falls over Europe, Kopfrkingl is slowly consumed by the darkness. And when Reinkeke suggests that Kopfrkingl’s wife is surely half Jewish, his son irreversibly effeminate and his poor, beautiful daughter undoubtedly tainted by her mother’s blood, Kopfrkingl’s obsession with perfection and purification spirals out of control.
Resonant of such films as
Repulsion, Vampyr and
Carnival Of Souls,
The Cremator is unlike any movie you’ve ever seen before. It's a horror film about a horror that has not yet arrived, but which is only just beginning to stretch its shadowy fingers out over the land, consuming the pure and corrupting the good. This film literally flows, never jarred by jumpcuts or breaks, serenely unspooling itself calmly, gently, dreamlike. And, like a dream, it grows slowly and steadily darker as it drifts along until the horror is up to your neck and sucking you in like quicksand. It’s slow, deliberate pace glides with all the indifference of a lobotomized cow up a slaughterhouse chute, its grim journey arriving at a foregone conclusion. As our moonfaced narrator, Rudolf Hrusínský is the epitome of Average, resembling an M-era Peter Lorre and seemingly about as threatening as the Pillsbury Dough Boy. But beneath that pasty, doughy exterior is a supremely cool, methodical creepiness which slowly blossoms into charnel madness. It’s an incredible performance, disarming and ultimately terrifying.
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| Bledá dívka - The Pale Girl |
Fans of Czech cinema are advised to sandwich this shadowy tale of impending doom in between the colorful, frivolous but no less advisory
Sedmikrasky (Daisies) and the lacy loveliness of
Valerie & Her Week Of Wonders, not only because those two films will lighten the mood of the oppressive Cremator and make sleep possible after a marathon viewing, but also because Helena Anyzova - who plays Valerie's grandmother/mother/vampire queen in Valerie also appears in The Cremator as the unnamed "Pale Girl" who haunts the Cremator throughout the film, never speaking but always looming.
With barely a Nazi in sight,
The Cremator brilliantly captures the insidiousness of the Holocaust as it takes over from within and makes monsters of the most boringly normal of men. And with barely a drop of blood to be found,
The Cremator still manages to be brutally, awfully real. This is pure horror, creeping up on you slowly and then bashing you over the head with its hideous beauty. Human failure has seldom seemed uglier.
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