🎃💀Hooptober 2020: Film 23/67💀🎃

Rudolf Hrušínský gives one of the most chilling performances I’ve ever seen as Karel Kopfrkingl, a Czech cremator who’s strange obsession with liberating the soul takes a dark turn when he begins to be courted to join the Nazi party. Aside from the extra-creepy performance, the film is made all the more unnerving by some incredible editing techniques that leave you disoriented and constantly wondering where you’ll end up from one shot to the next.

The surface narrative doesn’t really feel like the main focus here, but rather a vehicle to highlight how this paranoia and obsession with a “pure race” could have infected everyday people and slowly turned them mad. As those evil thoughts begin to seep in, the film starts to feel more disjointed and untethered from a sense of grounded reality. We can see the decline of a person who believes he is freeing souls from suffering and how terrifying that is when coupled with the ideology that brought the Nazis to power in the first place.

The Cremator was definitely an uncomfortable film to watch but it’s visual inventiveness made it impossible to look away and one that will stick with me for quite awhile.