With midterms and other large projects coming to a close, I decided to celebrate by once again going to the arts and media section of the library. Walking through the shelves and shelves of movies, most of which I’ve never heard of, has become a comforting and rewarding activity for me here at Penn State. Sometimes, I like to test my chances by picking a random film from my 2,000+ long watchlist of movies and seeing if the library has the random pick. This week, I landed on a film called The Cremator, and thankfully it was sitting right on the shelf in front of me.

The Cremator, or Spalovač Mrtvol, is a 1969 Czech film directed by Juraj Herz. The film, based on the book of the same name, is about a manager of a crematorium, Karel Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrušínský), with megalomanic tendencies and an unnatural fondness for death and is set in Prague in the 1930s.

Since I went into the film with no knowledge as to what it was about, Kopfrkingl appeared to be a sweet man to me at first. He constantly lovingly addresses his family and wife Lakmé (Vlasta Chramostová) and appears to be staying positive despite working a grueling job at the crematorium. However, I soon realized that I was wrong, very very VERY wrong, about him and that he is actually a psychopath who only really loves two things: himself, and his ability to “save” people by cremating them and letting their souls reach the ether (“liberation through incineration”).

The film hinges on Kopfrkingl’s deranged belief that cremation, and death in general, is a form of savior. Having this belief and working at a crematorium gives him a sense of great power and purpose. This hunger for power mirrors the political backdrop as Nazism enters the borderlines of the Czech Republic. Nazism poses a way for Kopfrkingl to further climb the social ladder, and possibly “save” more people than ever before, turning him into an absolute monster to the audience, but a godly priest-like figure to himself.

Although it may sound uninteresting to hear, some of my favorite parts of the movie were the technical aspects such as the cinematography and the editing. The film is shot in black and white on 35 mm film and is hypnotizing to look at. Most of the film is shot with an extremely wide lens, making many of the shots feel distorted, giving the movie an off-kilter air to it. The editing is some of the best I’ve seen in my life. What I really loved about it is that many of the scenes in the movie are written to start off in one setting and end in another, giving the film a disorienting and surrealist effect. But while it can be easy to write a movie to be this way, it is extremely difficult to actually pull it off. Jaromír Janáček, the editor, seamlessly and fluidly weaves the scenes together, never letting the audience get too comfortable with where things are at.

The Cremator was widely controversial and even banned in many countries for a very long time before it came to be the darkly humorous iconoclastic masterpiece that it is considered to be today. I feel as though this movie offers a lot more to discuss than what I am able to cover in this review (the innumerable close-ups of Hrušínský’s face to the point where looking at him gives me chills, the inclusion/symbolism of eroticism, the meaning of the recurring woman in black, the looping operatic music, the film’s implications and the beginning of the Czech new wave, etc., etc., etc.). So, if anyone’s interested in watching the movie after reading my rambling review and description, please do, and perhaps we can discuss all the intricacies to this grotesque and clever movie. And if not, I highly encourage you to at least watch the trailer to get even the slightest glimpse at what The Cremator has to offer.

I predict that I will be thinking about this for quite a while. 4 stars out of 5.