Bleak and Disturbing

Rating: 10/10 (16 January 2016)

It will take me a long time to get this film out of my brain. We are brought into a community where a baron runs things, almost the entire village affected by his whims. He lives with his young wife and children. She hates it there and the kids are accepted grudgingly by their peers. In the village are a harsh Protestant minister, a schoolteacher, a doctor, and other figures of fierce authority, plus quite a group of children who have lived in oppressive conditions. We are mad privy to the humorless village where no one smiles and where common people live in fear of the future. Religion is presented as a venomous and ugly thing. The minister's children are routinely beaten and humiliated for their "sins" including an awful diatribe on the results of masturbation (sores, mental illness, and death). The boy is forced to sleep with his hands tied to the sides of the bed. It becomes likely that all this oppression is going to ultimately lead to some pretty bad results. Visually, this film is striking in its utter blackness.