Well, it’s
certainly been a while since I’ve been so bothered by a film that I had to
pause for breaks at regular intervals.
Fortunately In A Glass Cage
was there to rectify this situation.
On to the
review!
In A Glass Cage is a Spanish film
about…well, it’s about suffering, really.
Years after WWII, Dr. Klaus (Gunter Meisner) is in hiding from his Nazi past. Himself, his wife Griselda (Marisa Paredes)
and his daughter Rena (Gisele Echevarria) live a very isolated life within a
Spanish villa. Their only visitor is the
maid and she only comes three times a week.
Well, Klaus,
for whatever reason, decides to step off the roof of his villa in an apparent
suicide attempt. This doesn’t go so well
because he’s still alive. But now he's paralyzed
and stuck inside an iron lung. Griselda
was already miserable before this so now she insists that a nurse be hired to
take care of Klaus so that she can concentrate on raising Rena.
Enter Angelo
(David Sust): a young, handsome local boy who manages to convince Klaus that it
would be in his best interest to hire the boy on. While Griselda does not agree, Rena seems to
like having someone in the house closer to her age and Klaus is insistent. Unfortunately Angelo is kind of the opposite
of a nurse. You see, he wants to be just
like Klaus. Klaus, the pedophile Nazi
who raped, tortured and murdered children.
Yeah, see why
this movie made me uncomfortable? It is
a 108 minute festival of discomfort. It
never outright terrifies like a slasher flick or a ‘true’ horror film
does. What it accomplishes is a slow
burn of discomfort. The kind where you
find yourself shifting in your seat, wondering if there’s something that needs
done in the kitchen just so you can get away.
It may not be A Serbian Film
but I definitely put In A Glass Cage
up there with Happiness in terms of
subject matter and general depressive atmosphere.
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