Des Teufels Bad
What the hell, I really only got the point with the last text crawl, good job everyone. It’s really The Witch meets Million Dollar Baby.
The whole thing is like The Witch but more personal. The setting is subsistence farmers in the sticks somewhere in Austria. The protagonist a young girl living with her mother and brother.
She marries some dude from the next village and they move into a house he bought, next to his mother. They don’t seem to have much in common, as he’s some manchild oaf, while she is a sensible soul without a knack for manual labour. He went into debt to finance the home, but that’s not even the main point of contention. He will work on the family business with her, and then she has her second job as housewife and animal husbandry specialist.
Like most young couples in the 1700’s rural areas, having children is the only north star that they can follow, so she tries. It seems, like the dauphin of France, that he doesn’t really know what sex is, he just jerks off into her ass then immediately falls asleep. This happens several times, he will not cooperate with the fecundation ritual. She gets really desperate.
After praying a lot, she tries to get back to her family but they send her back. She suspected her mother-in-law hated her, but now she heard it directly, and without any prospects of a better life, she snaps, depression sets in and she even tries suicide by eating rat poison. Doesn’t really work, she’s tough.
Since suicide is not an option, she does the next best thing, assisted suicide. She lures some kid to a secluded area, and just murders him. After that, she just turns herself in to the local castle, and a priest hear her confession.
She tells her tale and repents for having to kill some random kid to secure her right to stop existing. And by “stop existing”, I mean a good death, something that destroys her body while leaving her incorruptible soul intact, ready to enter heaven. She repent and the father delivered forgiveness, the gallows do not frighten her.
It’s not the gallows, but a burly man with a sword that decapitates her will a single swoop, a public execution that turns into a rowdy party, with music and bonfires. Her blood is collected in a bucket and sold to a thirsty crowd for consumption. These people are fucking insane.
Curious, now that I think about, there must be some war going on, because there are basically no adult or older men, only the priest. All the old people are woman.
The lead actress is some singer with minor acting experience, but she pulls it off, carrying the film slung over her shoulder.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.