Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit) Road Trilogy Pt. 3

KINGS OF THE ROAD (Im Lauf der Zeit) Road Trilogy Pt. 3            A            
Germany  (175 mi)  1976  d:  Wim Wenders

It has something to do with being born in post-war Germany in a land that tried to forget about its own history, tried to forget about its own myths, that tried to adapt to anything, especially American culture.          —Wim Wenders

One of Wenders’ best, clever, existentialist, and amusingly insightful on several different levels, perhaps the only film ever seen where a Volkswagen Bug is driven like a sports car, where it accelerates out of the blocks, screeches around turns, and opens up on the straightaways, blindly flying through intersections at full speed with no regard apparently for the consequences, where the driver (Hanns Zischler) becomes known, affectionately enough, as Kamikaze.  In a memorable opening sequence, he unintentionally hooks up with fellow road traveler Bruno (Rüdiger Vogler), looking a bit like the director himself with that shaggy dog look, who is parked along the side of the road in his live-in moving and storage truck, noted for an illuminated Michelin man doll next to the big lettered emblem above the front windshield, “UMZUGE,” apparently a German reference for a moving van.  Not just a road movie, but more an anthem to road movies, as the three-hour length only accentuates the passing of time, becoming a prominent theme, where the relaxed and leisurely pace never wavers, where the road music is expressed by recurring guitar motifs by Alex Linstädt that couldn’t be more warmly welcoming and upbeat.  Shot along the border regions between East and West Germany, which is listed in the opening credits, along with the correct aspect ratio, of all things, this is a mesmerizing road movie shot in Black and White by Robbie Müller and Martin Schäfer, a film that reaches under the surface to reveal a great deal about the changing face of cinema and Germany’s divided history.  There are plenty of American references as well, mostly in the prevalent use of rock ‘n’ roll music, including English lyrics that they can’t get out of their heads, where at one point the characters remark that “the Yanks have colonized our subconscious.”

This could be seen as a German version of Easy Rider (1969), one where the photographic landscapes often dominate the central characters, where the focus may shift to merging trains with the road, or filming reflections off the truck’s windowshield or side view mirrors, all fleeting images of transience.  Clearly a generational movie, one that identifies with the post 60’s cultural changes and the yearning for individualism and freedom, Wenders brilliantly interweaves into the storyline the lives of several elderly people whose pasts shadow the present, often in haunting yet illuminating ways.  Sleeping on the side of the road in his truck, Bruno roams the country roads as a traveling projectionist, repairing old broken down movie projectors, bringing them back to life, at least temporarily, in the small towns with a sole family run theater that is barely surviving due to the commercial influence of American films in the bigger cities, effectively shutting down the German market and the small town picture shows.  One elderly gentleman, a former Nazi party member who ran a theater back in the silent era, explains he had to petition the government after the war to get his ownership re-instated, explaining there were many who were forced to do the same, wondering what good it did any of them as nobody comes to their theaters anymore.  Bruno and Kamikaze, both estranged from their parents, hit the road together as resourceful, free spirited, and independent minded men who face their responsibilities and the future with a casual air of disregard, instead leaning more towards living in the moment.  Wenders’ brilliance in this film is capturing in detail so many of those moments as they unravel in real time.  Like JULES AND JIM (1962), which (referring to the novel upon which it was based) Truffaut called “a perfect hymn to love, perhaps even a hymn to life,” this film is also a celebration of camaraderie and friendship, but this is post French New Wave, where the joyful energy and exuberance has dimmed and both men are more about living and getting on in their lives with some degree of personal satisfaction.  

One of the most beautiful sequences involves a theater partially filled with grade school children impatiently waiting for the movie to start, where the time for repairs only makes the kids more tired and restless, until in a stroke of mad genius, Kamikaze turns on a theater light behind the movie screen, where the two are silhouetted like moving puppets, carrying on a charade of physical comedy and farce which changes the expression on the kid’s faces to utter amazement, as if they’re literally witnessing magic for the first time.  In another extended sequence, Bruno meets a bored theater cashier, Lisa Kreuzer, flirting with her openly, eventually forced into service as the projectionist didn’t have a clue what they were doing.  This is the closest he comes to developing a rapport with the opposite sex, where they end up spending the night in a cramped room above the theater, but not as you might expect, as they’re friendly enough, but they can never find the words to get started, leaving each as devastatingly empty afterwards as the theater itself.  Something should be said however for the growing relationship of the two men, so much of which is unspoken, as they are never actually friends, meeting by chance, and neither ever makes any gut-wrenching confessional speeches to one another, but are merely traveling companions whose days run together as they share experiences, becoming familiar but from a safe distance.  Each man is forced to challenge their own personal comfort zone as perhaps they’re living too comfortably, always passing through the lives of others, but never stopping to take hold of real love or responsibility.  Both end up taking side trips to visit their surviving parents with surprisingly different results, where in both cases we see a gentle side of them that is vulnerable and exposed. 

Despite being an open road picture, much of what happens takes place in the cramped quarters of projection booths, the front seat or the tight sleeping quarters of the truck, a lone food outlet on the side of the road, an isolated gas station, or the empty confines of a movie theater, all places where they are either alone, peering through a protected booth, or more likely with one other person.  What this suggests is that much of our lives we are tucked out of reach from others, whether it’s family or friends, our memories, even our nation’s history, as we all deal with as much as we can seemingly alone.  The open road or freedom, when seen in this light, actually prevents close personal involvement with others, as we’re too busy leaving or making our escape.  The projection booths are filled with old movie posters of Brigitte Bardot or Fritz Lang, various pin-up girls, but also faces we have forgotten through the passage of time.  When an elderly woman speaks of her disinterest in the kinds of films being made today, suggesting the audience turns into dazed, stone faced robots, she is really reminiscing about the life and vitality of her era, much of which, due to the negative history of the Third Reich, the rest of the world has denounced or forgotten.  Nonetheless it remains an intense recollection that few other memories in her life can equal.   A disconnection to one’s life, or the past, the divisive nature of which becomes another theme of the film, culminating in an intriguing sequence at a dead end border crossing into East Germany, where they arrive at a vacated sentry station in the middle of the night.  The names of American cities are carved on the walls, where they may as well be a million miles from nowhere, and in a drunken confrontation, they amusingly discuss their vital need for women, which unfortunately comes at the cost of individual freedom.  In the bright light of the next morning, peering over into the vast unchartered territory of East Germany, the border is seen as an inhospitable and foreboding place, a combination of forbidden territory and a promised land on the other side. 

Sabotage

Hitchcock on the set with Oscar Homolka

Hitchcock shooting on the set of Sabotage, 1936

SABOTAGE        B                 

aka:  The Woman Alone

Great Britain  (76 mi)  1936  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

One of the more provocatively compelling Hitchcock films from the 30’s, though it may be Hitchcock’s version of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), a film that led to lacerating criticism, including Kubrick death threats, so he pulled the film from theaters and refused to show it in England for the next 30 years, as the public associated the horrific violence in that film with a marked rise in street crime.  Hitchcock’s film, confusingly coming on the heels of a film he made entitled SECRET AGENT (1936), and a later film called SABOTEUR (1942), is loosely based upon Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent, one of the great modernist novels that insightfully predicts the historical influence of anarchist and revolutionary violence, also the creation of secret police units, long before many of the social uprisings of the twentieth century.  While the book explores the consequences of radical terrorism through detailed characterizations of the people involved, showing the negative effect it has not only on the individual, but also their families, Hitchcock is similarly interested in the scapegoat theme, where innocents are sacrificed while carrying out terrorist aims, which in the film remain nameless.  Nonetheless the centerpiece of the film features a scene showing how others are unsuspectingly exploited into the services of these shadowy groups, where Hitchcock builds tension through a carefully sustained editing scheme leading up to the violence, but is less convincing when it comes to the ramifications.  Certainly one of the things the film gets right is a pervading mood of paranoia creeping into British life in the preamble to World War II when Europe was on the brink of war, in this case fed by suspicious acts of sabotage meant to frighten citizens and divert their attention from abroad, where Hitchcock introduces the subject in a brilliant opening montage connecting a literal dictionary definition of the word “sabotage” as the deliberate destruction of buildings or machinery “with the object of alarming a group of persons or inspiring public uneasiness,” with electrical inspectors discovering foul play in shutting down their generators, causing the lights to go out in London, where we hear their panicked voices sound out in confusion, “Sand.  Sabotage.  Wrecking.  Deliberate. What’s at the back of it?  Who did it?”  Hitchcock leaves no doubt who did it, as we see a lone man creeping through the dark of the backstreets to get away, washing the sand off his hands once he gets home, an act as futile as Macbeth trying to wash the blood off his hands.  In this way, the audience is introduced to the terrorist, Karl Anton Verloc (Oscar Homolka), before anyone in the film becomes aware.  In fact, his wife Winnie (Sylvia Sidney) defends him throughout as the kind of man that wouldn’t harm anyone.  The power outage causes an angry mob scene outside where people are in a frenzy demanding their money back from the small Verloc owned movie theater, where just as they are about to get their money refunded the power mysteriously comes back on. 

Hitchcock paints an intimate family portrait, where a middle-aged Verloc speaks with a thick Eastern European accent, has a younger American wife, who married the older Verloc apparently not out of love, but because he provides a good home and is good to her much younger brother Stevie (Desmond Tester), who demonstrates a lovable clumsiness in the kitchen, while an interested admirer, Ted Spencer (John Loder), works next door at the fruit stand.  It’s a familiar love triangle, where the younger woman meets a handsome man her own age, while the older husband she respects and feels indebted to is hiding a terrible secret.  How long will it take her to find out the secret and switch her allegiance to the other man?  Little does anyone know both men are covers for their real interests, where Verloc is a paid terrorist belonging to some secret underground organization while Spencer is an undercover detective working for Scotland Yard trying to expose whoever’s behind the recent series of terrorist acts.  Stated bluntly, the powerful men behind these acts are too carefully protected and concealed to catch, so what Scotland Yard is after are the people they hire to carry out their dirty business.  Spencer has been watching Verloc, suspects he is responsible for the blackout, and has a man tail him afterwards when he meets another suspicious looking, well-dressed foreigner named Vladimir (Austin Trevor) at the Aquarium, receiving a money package in an envelope where he’s ordered to escalate his next mission to something more devastating.  Despite raising objections about the potential loss of life, he needs the cash, which places him in a bind, as he needs to support his family.  Later Verloc visits a pet store with plenty of canaries, immediately recalling the apocalyptic doom of The Birds (1963), where the proprietor, Professor Chatman (William Dewhurst), amusingly promises singing canaries, but when a customer brings them back when they refuse to sing, he claims the customer is at fault.  Led into the back room, the fidgety Professor, an explosives expert, lays out his plans to bomb the Victoria railway station in Picadilly Circus while the streets are overflowing with admiring citizens on the afternoon of The Lord Mayor's Show Street Parade, where in a clever shot Verloc imagines seeing collapsing buildings as he stares into a fish tank, with the Professor delivering the bomb to Verloc’s home hidden in a birdcage.  Meanwhile Spencer has been working on getting information out of Winnie and her brother, but quickly realize they’re hiding nothing, focusing all of their attention on Verloc, literally surrounding the house with agents making it impossible for him to leave, so he devises a plan to send the unsuspecting Stevie instead, supposedly delivering two canisters of film (Bartholomew the Strangler) along with a wrapped package carrying the bomb, with strict instructions to deliver the package no later than 1:30, as the bomb is expected to detonate fifteen minutes later.   

One might recall Hitchcock’s extended cameo sequence in Blackmail (1929), where he’s seen as a subway passenger who’s continually bothered by a persistent little boy that keeps pestering him by grabbing his hat, a scene the audience finds adorable.  Stevie’s bomb delivery sequence is a ghastly inversion of that scene, where instead of smiling at the cuteness of the child, the audience is shaken to the core at the thought of what might happen, where Hitchcock creates considerable suspense showing how a young boy doesn’t at all understand the seriousness of the situation, and instead of delivering the package promptly he is seen dawdling through the city streets along the way, getting sidetracked by all the activity, continually cross-cutting different events that delay him even further, mixed in with updated shots of a clock revealing the time.  Quentin Tarantino lifted a clip from this film in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009) demonstrating the perils of carrying nitrate film, as they were highly flammable and were not allowed on British public transportation for safety reasons, which only delayed Stevie’s journey even more.  As the time clicks down, it’s clear he can’t make it unless he’s allowed onto a bus, where the conductor insists that he sit away from other passengers, but as time slips away, he’s still on the bus at the appointed time and instead he’s seen playing with a puppy before the blast occurs.  Audiences were horrified by the killing a child, where according to François Truffaut, “Making a child die in a picture is a rather ticklish matter; it comes close to an abuse of cinematic power,” as it took much of the tension right out of the air, where many felt it was overly cruel, though it’s undeniably a powerful scene, taken straight from the book.  Hitchcock later regretted harming a character the audience sympathized with, especially a child, calling it a violation of his own cardinal rules, but did not regret showing the explosion, where Hitchcock’s treatment leading up to it was years ahead of its time.  Viewed from today, after the world has experienced precisely these kinds of terrorist incidents, including the 7 July 2005 bombings in London, the audience’s identification with the character only makes it that much more uncomfortable and tragic, becoming one of Hitchcock’s most powerful scenes.  Hitchcock was likely influenced by German director Fritz Lang, as actress Sylvia Sydney worked the same year in Lang’s FURY (1936), but especially his interest in crime, as both directors shared an abiding obsession with themes of murder and guilt, where both used suspense and a subjective use of space to establish intensely personal points of view (like the ten-minute sequence following Stevie), leading us farther into the character’s psyche than audiences had ever been before, feeling the full emotional effects of the victims onscreen.  Before Hitchcock rose to prominence, it was Lang who was con­sidered by many to be cinema’s preeminent master of suspense, where his thrillers had a profound influence on Hitchcock’s precise means of visual and narrative storytelling, as it was Lang’s fusion of criminality and ordinary life in M (1931) that had such an impact on future directors, where both returned again and again to themes of murder, guilt, identity, sexuality, and the creation of suspense.  Lang may have pioneered the espionage and conspiracy film, but it was Hitchcock who added his own mischievous personality, mixing jeopardy with sex appeal and a delicious sense of humor.  While Lang eventually saw crime as part of an overall social system, Hitchcock focused more on the personal ramifications. where as time went on Hitchcock realized his true vocation was a crime thriller director, becoming more and more fascinated with murder, eventually called the Master of Suspense.  But in this film, Hitchcock was as yet to become the director that we know of today.

After the bombing, Hitchcock veers from Conrad’s book and creates his own memorable aesthetic, as it’s one of the few Hitchcock films without a mystery, as the audience knows Verloc is the saboteur from the beginning, so the film is largely told through pure visual storytelling, where it’s almost entirely a suspense film.  After hearing about the death of her brother, Mrs. Verloc is in a state of shock, wandering into the cinema where the audience is howling with laughter over a Disney cartoon, Who Killed Cock Robin? (1935), where she sits down and for a moment laughs along with them until an arrow pierces Cock Robin’s heart, and the narrator boldly asks, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”  This blending of the real and the unreal leads to one of the most inventive montage sequences in the film, when Mr. Verloc returns home and rationalizes his actions, showing more concern for his dinner than her brother’s death, becoming a drama of exchanged glances with her husband, glaring at him with suspicion while he tries to maintain a sense of balance and normalcy, but she continues glaring a hole right through him, capturing a look of rage and hatred in her eyes.  This is as perfectly executed a sequence as the lead-up to the bombing, where there is no dialogue, no music, just quick successive shots of faces and hands as Mrs. Verloc serves her husband dinner, a vegetable platter where her hand almost automatically becomes glued to the serving knife, where the camera continues to probe under the surface where the tension elevates when he becomes aware of the knife, yet the expression on their faces is unchanged, trying not to give anything away.  The way the scene is shot everything revolves around the knife, where their actions are utterly convincing, a choreography of two wounded souls as he walks over towards her, where she’s in a heightened state of alert, in a panicked fright, where a sudden noise creates a reflex action where the knife accidentally finds her husband, who drops to the floor.  The shock of losing her husband and brother leads to an unending sense of despair, rescued from turning herself in suddenly by an intruding Spencer, as he has romantic inclinations.  Spencer’s hopeful mood of optimism is totally out of synch with the rest of the picture, most especially the depths of anguish of the emotionally tormented Mrs. Verloc, and the finale feels empty, as it’s largely manipulated and orchestrated by a character whose motives are not fully trusted by the audience, bringing the film to a disappointing conclusion.  While there are spectacular sequences contained within the film, overall the film as a cohesive whole just doesn’t hold together.  The ending does recall Blackmail (1929), which also features a woman committing a murder in a dazed state.  Both films end similarly with the heroine prevented from confessing their crimes by a policeman boyfriend.  While it’s one of Hitchcock’s darkest works, it’s not nearly as bleak as the book which has Mrs. Verloc hurling herself over the railing of a ferry and drowning in the English Channel.  Sidney did not understand Hitchcock’s working methods, especially such a lengthy scene without dialogue, where she might expect extended camera time, but Hitchcock used short quick takes and worked it all out in the editing room.  It was only after they hastily put together a rough daily version of the completed scene that she understood how it all came together, taking her totally by surprise, as she developed a dislike bordering on contempt for Hitchcock up until that point.  The film received acclaim from esteemed American and British film critics Dave Kehr and Raymond Durgnat, calling it the summit of Hitchcock’s British period.  Perhaps the real trouble with SABOTAGE is the time of its release, much like the book which predates actual historical events, where the world was not yet familiar with  the work of terrorists or suicide bombers and found the gruesomeness of the act rather preposterous at the time, coming before Hitchcock became Hitchcock, where the deaths of the young boy and the husband in this film are as fully realized as the notorious shower scene in Psycho (1960), but placed in a more meaningful context.    

Beginning in 1934, coincidentally the year of Hitler’s rise to German Führer and his declaration of dictatorial power, Hitchcock created a series of politically themed British spy thrillers, beginning with THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934) through The Lady Vanishes (1938), continuing again in the early 40’s in America, all set in a backdrop of contemporary European politics, though Hitchcock had no interest in ideologies or delving into international relations, but used these real-life circumstances purely to enhance his own cinematic explorations, where ordinary English citizens caught up in extraordinary moments were expected to stop foreign spy rings.  Hitchcock went so far as to exclude national identities, or the cause of the political unrest, as his personal interest lay elsewhere.  This may surprise some, as Hitchcock lived in Europe during Hitler’s rise to power between 1933 and 1939, when German anti-Semitism spread throughout Europe, yet “the Jewish question” is not a part of Hitchcock’s films.  According to An interview with Patrick McGilligan - Dvdclassik, author of Alfred Hitchcock : a Life in Darkness and Light, “Hitchcock was definitely an anti-Nazi and (later) an anti-Communist, so his personal stance was anti-totalitarian.”  Hitchcock’s films often warn against spies or terrorists, but offer little commentary on the complicity of governments, where the political sophistication of his postwar masterwork NOTORIOUS (1946) may be an exception.  As an individual, Hitchcock had many leftist friends and collaborators, but never viewed himself as a political person and avoided making political statements both in interviews and in his films, which adds an element of timelessness to his films, as they retain the central drama of the story rather than comment upon some ideology that has fallen out of fashion.  The key to his success was his flair for narrative, using a kind of cinematic shorthand, working things out to the smallest detail ahead of time, often withholding crucial information from both his onscreen characters and the audience in order to heighten the suspense, while accentuating motive and the underlying psychology.  Hitchcock’s films were strongly believed to have been extensively storyboarded in meticulous fashion during pre-production, but much of this may have been a mythology pushed by the director himself, creating a picture of competency and total artistic control before the shooting even began.  Hitchcock rarely bothered looking through the viewfinder, as he already envisioned the film he wanted to make, yet he was also flexible enough to adapt to changes that occur during the filming process, actually changing the entire concept of NOTORIOUS midway through the production.  While his specialty may be crime storytelling, this was not a style he invented, but was an as yet unexplored artform when he started out, where like Shakespeare, he was not afraid to borrow or blend the best ideas of others into his own works, eventually reaching the pinnacle of success through the crime thriller due to his amazing consistency to intelligently entertain and amaze audiences over six decades of filmmaking, becoming a premiere artist who is in the running for the greatest director in the history of cinema, with Vertigo (1958) finally reaching the top of the list of the once-a-decade poll Sight & Sound 2012 Polls | BFI voted as the greatest film of all-time.  

Note – The Hitchcock cameo occurs at about the 9-minute mark, immediately after the lights are turned back on and just before the lady shuts the theater kiosk window, where Hitchcock can be seen wearing a coat and hat walking on the sidewalk from the center of the screen to the viewer’s left, leaning back and looking upwards. 

According to David Sterritt, author of The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock - Page 12 - Google Books Result:

Three observations can be made concerning this and other cameos. First, Hitchcock enters his movies not only to wink and wave at his audience, but to comment on the action in some small, sly way that accords with the manipulative, often sardonic attitude that characterises much of his work in general. Second, his presence indicates a wish to approach and ‘keep an eye on’ his characters.

Third, the cameos signal to his audience (which normally receives the message on a subliminal level) that he is the presiding spirit of his films. Each movie posits a particular relationship between its characters, on one hand, and fate – or destiny, luck, the way of the world – on the other. In every case, it is Hitchcock who has determined what kind of relationship this will be and how it will work itself out through narrative mechanisms. His on-screen presence is a mischievously overt signature that proclaims his control over the narrative and the world that it constructs.

Of Good Report

OF GOOD REPORT           B             

South Africa  (109 mi)  2013  d:  Jahmil X.T. Qubeka   Website     Trailer

An extremely provocative South African film, where the director was born in South Africa, raised in East London, educated in English, where his first feature film is something of an homage to genre pictures, including film noir, as it is shot in low contrast Black and White and features a lead character, Parker Sithole (Mothusi Magano), a teacher by trade who is besieged by hallucinations, yet never utters a word.  The film certainly plays on audience expectations, where it’s hard to believe anyone entering the theater could have possibly anticipated what this film delivers, as it’s a bit mind blowing.  With only one film under his belt, Qubeka is already the bad boy of South Africa, a bit like the brash style of Tarantino, but Qubeka is much more experimental, where the director does resort to exploitive and often horrific imagery, including the naked body of a minor, which has generated criticism that he’s a child pornographer, yet supposedly the film was made to elevate a public discussion on social issues, specifically gender violence.  One might question whether the best way to elucidate the issue is to make a film where an adult brutalizes a young girl, but that is one of the fundamental problems in South Africa, where according to the Human Rights watch in 2001, “for many South African girls, violence and abuse are an inevitable part of the school environment.”  This is a nation where educators misuse their authority and sexually abuse young girls.  It’s not young boys that are impregnating young girls, it’s those with money (which the kids certainly don’t have), the stereotypical “sugar daddy.”  In one South African province alone, KwaZulu-Natal, today there are somewhere between 10 – 15,000 female students that become pregnant each year, astonishing figures, which don’t even take into account the number who may have contracted HIV or other sexually transmitted infections.

Initially scheduled to premiere at the Durban International Film Festival, the largest in South Africa, the film was banned prior to the screening on child pornographer issues, something that took the filmmaker completely by surprise as he wasn’t aware they banned films in South Africa post 1994, where prior to that they banned everything, “including Eddie Murphy movies.”  The Durban Festival has a history of protest, and of showing taboo work, where even during the apartheid era when films were routinely banned, the festival found a way to show those films.  Within about 10 days, the court overturned the ban, as the actress playing the 16-year old child is actually 23, and allowed the film to be seen on the final day of the festival.  Mind you, this film offers no moralizing or lectures of any kind, and isn’t remotely a message film, but is a hugely subversive take on genre films, using a radical musical score from Philip Miller, much of it drawn from his LP Music for the Films of William Kentridge, whose unnerving dissonance keeps the audience disoriented and provides a shattered sensibility, reflecting the psychological breakdown of the lead character, Parker Sithole, who served time as a soldier before reporting for duty in an impoverished rural South African township with no local connections, yet he comes with excellent recommendations, a man “of good report” during a time of teacher shortages, so he’s seen as exactly what they need and is immediately enlisted as a school teacher, where everyone involved with the school has high hopes for this shy and quietly introverted man.  So with inverted expectations, it’s a bit shocking to see him instead develop into a deranged psychopath, where the film shows the early origins of a serial killer, where Parker becomes sexually involved with a beautiful underage girl, Nolitha (Petronella Tshuma), something of a sirenesque Lolita who turns out to be one of the students in his class, but rather than end the relationship, he escalates the time they spend together, becoming more and more sexually obsessed, where he does little to hide his prurient interest in her.   

Using flashbacks and dream sequences, along with frequent hallucinations, Parker goes berserk when Nolitha leaves him, becoming Othello to her Desdemona, often veering into the horror genre, where the past and present converge and it’s often hard to distinguish between some of his mad ravings that exist only in his head and what actually happens, much like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000).  While offering a convincing portrait of a tortured man who can’t help himself, it recalls Peter Lorre in M (1931), a psychopathic pedophile who can’t stop himself from kidnapping and murdering little girls.  Parker is a miserably lonely man, likely stripped of all dignity during apartheid, endlessly wallowing away his time as a soldier, where he learns to kill, slowly losing touch with the world as he descends further into the moral abyss, escalating into utter depravity, becoming a nightmarish vision of Hell on earth where he hermetically seals himself away from the world outside, utterly alone with his handiwork.  We see what he does, which for some will be graphically excessive, generating gasps in the audience, and we see him get away with it, at least temporarily, where he lives to do it all over again, like a deadly parasite attaching itself to another living form.  Opening and closing with the same visual motif, a man stumbling through the desert, where the camera shows nothing above the waist and focuses only on his dirty boots covered in mud and dust, a highly effective device, as the film is about the arrival of a stranger, a non entity, someone with no local roots, who comes bearing excellent recommendations, a man “of good report,” where much like the white-gloved, overly polite boys in Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), no sooner have they brutally murdered one family before they move on to the next.  Of interest, this is a South African and Icelandic production, where one wonders where the Icelanders came into the picture.  The director, who was present for the screening, suggested he would love to come back to this character in about 20 years and pick it up again.  When he made it, he was hoping it would become a cult film.  It’s a strange and intensely moody portrayal of a post-apartheid society that fails to recognize the continuing existence of an evil presence lurking within, that lives invisibly among us, where over the end credits the film turns to color with an animated red Devil dancing off to the side, a laughing reminder of more victims yet to come.