Director: Andrzej Zulawski
Writers: Andrzej Zulawski
Stars: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen
2 Hours, 4 minutes
Get it from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2XgHqKk
Mark comes home from a secret work trip to his home in West Germany (in 1981) to find that his wife, Anna, wants a divorce. When he asks why, she says “I don’t know.” Mark finds a postcard at the apartment with a romantic note on it from “Heinrich.” She admits to him that there’s another man.
After a few weeks, Mark has gone a little bit insane. His apartment’s all torn up, he hasn’t shaved in three weeks, and he seems to be having seizures.
He cleans himself up and goes to see his young son, Bob, who’s been left alone in the house for a long time. Mark is angry, and when Anna returns, they fight and then get back together.
Heinrich calls and said she was with him, and she’s left Mark in the middle of the night. He calls Anna’s friend, Margie, and Margie says she hasn’t seen Anna there for weeks.
Mark takes Bob to school, and Bob’s teacher looks exactly like Anna.
Mark goes to see Heinrich, who lives with his mother. Heinrich beats the crap out of Mark, but he also seems very attracted to Mark. Heinrich says he hasn’t seen Anna in quite some time. Mark confronts Anna, and there is a lot of screaming. He beats her up rather graphically.
Mark hires a private investigator to follow Anna.
Mark and Anna fight again, and Anna jabs herself in the neck with an electric knife. Later on, Mark cuts into his own arm with it on purpose.
The detective follows Anna to her apartment, and she acts insane when he comes inside. He sees a slimy thing on the wall, and Anna kills the detective. Heinrich shows up at Mark’s place, and he’s high on mushrooms, literally bouncing off the walls.
Mark sleeps with the teacher, and he doesn’t seem to car what happens to Anna after that.
The detective’s partner goes looking for him. He goes into the apartment and sees a slimy, tentacled creature on her bed, and the dead man’s body in the corner. Anna grabs his gun and shoots the second detective repeatedly.
Anna then gives a long soliloquy to the audience, talking through the camera at us.
Then Mark and Anna scream at each other some more, while Anna writhes her hands dramatically and then grunts at the camera for several long minutes. Then she goes berserk in the subway. Wow. Just wow.
Mark tells Heinrich where Anna lives, hoping he’ll be killed as well. Heinrich sees the thing in the bedroom, which now looks like a cross between a cenobyte and Eraserhead. Heinrich sees the detective’s severed heads in the refrigerator, and then Anna stabs him and he runs off. He calls Mark, and Mark smiles. Mark goes over there, and he finds the heads in the fridge, but doesn’t see Anna or the monsters.
Mark meets Heinrich at a bar, knocks him over the head, and drowns him in the toilet. Then he heads over to Anna’s place and sets it on fire. Then he goes home, and for some reason Margie’s throat has been cut and she dies too.
Mark goes to Anna’s and watches her have sex with the tentacle monster.
Then he goes to Heinrich’s mother’s place and tells her that he’s dead. She takes a bunch of pills right in front of Mark, then lays down in bed to die.
Mark’s employer returns, tempting him to come back to work for them. Then there’s a shoot out in front of the apartment with lots of explosions for no real reason. Mark wrecks his motorcycle then limps up the steps to the top of the nearest building where he sees Anna and a duplicate of himself coming up the stairs. Out of the blue, the police shoot them both with machine guns and Anna dies. Mark throws himself off the stairway and dies.
Then something vague happens to the schoolteacher and Bob. The end.
Commentary
The movie is described as a surreal version of a mental breakdown.
If I wasn’t reviewing this movie, I’d have turned it off fifteen minutes in. Then again at thirty minutes. At forty minutes, I was at the “I don’t get paid enough to watch this shit” stage. Then the screaming and raving slowed down for a bit. Then there was the infamous subway scene, and I was back to walking out again. Still, I had to keep watching, cause I didn’t want to be the one to give up on this turd first. We were on a roller coaster to Hell, and I was daring Kevin to quit first. We both lost this contest.
The director supposedly based a lot of this movie on his own real-life divorce, which must have really been something.
All the actors are a little too loud, a little too exaggerated, and a little too dramatic; it’s like watching a play where the actors have to project to a crowded audience. Or better yet, an acting course, where the people have to pour everything they have into a disjointed scene that has no real context. It’s the kind of things actors give other actors awards for because there’s so much “acting” going on.
It’s pretentious crap, and I wish I had had the puking flu on the night we decided to watch this. It would have been way better!
I’ve heard that this movie gets better on the second and third viewing. Oh, Hell no!