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The first and last shots summarize the toll of the trajectory, red credits on a winding road and zooms on a vacant horizon. Stricken mute by a childhood violation, the heroine (Christina Lindberg) is a lissome farm girl who misses her bus and gets scooped up by a slimy dandy (Heinz Hopf). "Now life really begins." Drugged, shanghaied to an underworld playpen and disfigured (her new eyepatch is but another fetish for the clients), she numbly endures her plight while secretly preparing for retribution. "A cruel picture" from beginning to end, a deliberate distillate of exploitation terrors in autumnal sunlight. Bo Arne Vibenius' apprenticeship with Bergman is periodically visible (the villain's letter to his captive's parents dissolves to the devastated mother reciting it straight into the camera, cf. Winter Light), otherwise the main stylistic crucible is Chabrol's Que la Bête Meure. Judo and shotguns harden the kewpie doll, a black leather duster becomes her hunting uniform as she cuts a vengeful swath through town and country. A grindhouse Seeräuberjenny and then some: "I like women who don't talk too much, but you set a new record." Placid vistas suddenly rattled by hand-held POV inserts, sequences of face-stomping and squib-bursting flattened and prolonged into severe abstraction. I Spit on Your Grave, Ms. 45, Sudden Impact... A stark Scandinavian silence, pierced by amplified moans and echoing gunblasts and ironically ethereal chorales. Herzog takes up the slow-mo excruciation (Woyzeck), Von Trier the hardcore inclusions. "She's nuts! She's challenged me to a duel!" On a pale windswept meadow the bareness of annihilation, the blindness of revenge. With Solveig Andersson, Per-Axel Arosenius, and Gunnel Wadner.
--- Fernando F. Croce |