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Edgar Cochran ✝️🍋5.0

The Cremator is a two-layered experience of immense depth, let alone one of the counted films in history that can be called "ahead of its time".With a staggering cinematography, the most memorable male character in the Czech New Wave, a neo-noir ambience, an hypnotic directing, a terrifying score, and probably a leading performance that deserves to be held as one of the best in cinema history, The Cremator is an unapologetic downward spiral to delusional madness of a man that strongly believes in the purifying power of cremation and the metaphysical advantages provided by premature death in order to stop human suffering. The presence of this intellectual personage is so imposing, that the rest of the characters around him seem like defenseless puppets, including Jirí Menzel himself. His physiognomy correlates in a shocking way with his indecipherable intentions. The scenarios, paintings and architecture dance around his macabre deeds and communicate ominous statements waiting to be revealed. His whole fictional trademark personality precedes an important number of antagonists in cinema, especially those having "intellectual" and "artistic" inclinations to politics and artforms to disguise their own existential banalities addressed with fundamentalisms. Think of him as the grandfather of many, including Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000), but infinitely more ambitious.On the other hand, you have a tremendous political subtext as the German troops have arrived to the Czech border. With the advice of his friend, Kopfrkingl is now considering the importance of his possible German heritage and the issue of his partial Jewish life. This was the volatile component in the cremator's mentality to unleash a paranoiac divine mission that pushes him to execute a permanent task during his stay on this earth while proclaiming the upcoming new order that he felt was about to be established by the Führer. Far from clichéd, this is extremely original and quite horrifying, even as a subtext.With a Svankmajer editing, the film uses landscapes, attrezzos, mansions, horror stories told with wax figures, images of suffering and in-house locations to conduct an unprecedented operatic nightmare of unspeakable psychological proportions. With nothing left to say, the status of this film is of the highest quality among international cinema, of any decade, of any place.99/100

Josh Lewis5.0

A concentration camp survivor reworks the horrifying wide-angle, POV subjectivity of something like Peeping Tom to fit the snarling, darkly comic, absurdly disturbing headspace of a compulsive, obsessive cremator who views his craft as an art, gradually morphs into a tool for/the arm of the genocidal Nazi machine, and may or may not think he's the next Buddha due to his occupation of "liberating" souls from their bodies. An unbearable, close-proximity depiction of how evil can delude itself into thinking it’s actually a work of purity and spiritualism with very few psychological and ideological tweaks. Full discussion on ep 219 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

Joshua Dysart5.0

If you’re a handsy repressed smug conformist with no original thoughts yet love to hear yourself talk, you’re probably a secret fascist just waiting to be given permission by an authority figure to murder. That’s just facts. You romanticize and aggrandize yourself, but like all romantics you’re just a blockhead tool waiting... longing... to be told you're important.Director Juraj Herz was a survivor of Ravensbrück concentration camp as a child and you can see how that personal experience gave him bold proprietary permission to mock and explore this horrifying subject to such great effect.The tying of transcendental buddhism to our protagonist’s increasingly manipulated and ideologically thirsty mind is sweet perfection. Magical thinking is most often the out for the murderous and the lopsided. And of course, there’s the long standing fascination the Nazis had with Tibetan Buddhism, which historically speaks to this phenomenon of magical thinking as an engine of socially insane behavior in the name of righteousness.I’m so jazzed the Collab picked this once banned, sub-serialist (anti-realist?), post-expressionist, Czech New Wave masterpiece for our Halloween month. It’s probably been twelve years since I was introduced to this, and I wanted to check if the spell it cast over me back when I very first saw the opening zoo scene (with his half-jewish children briefly seen in cages) could still hold. And yes, the movie is so layered and intricate and controlled that a rewatch is almost mandatory to fully submerge in its bleak, vast thesis. Also, the print was remastered in 2019 and it looks even more gorgeous. Also, Jaromír Janáček’s editing is school.