OPIUM - EGY ELMEBETEG NÖ NAPLOJA

A rich pictorial broadsheet that celebrates suffering, the exquisite agony of pain. The trappings of a lunatic asylum in the early 20th century are laid out in all their gruesome glory, allowing the story of a doctor and his beautiful patient to exert its strange fascination. Dr. Jozsef Brenner has withdrawn to the hospital in order to flee his own depression, his writer’s block. And it’s the ideal environment in which to hide behind a white coat his own morphine addiction. His comparatively modern methods of treatment meet with the disapproval of the director of the hospital, who owns a very impressive collection of torture instruments and infernal machines. Gizella Klein, a patient convinced she’s possessed by the forces of evil, attracts Brenner’s particular interest. She fills up stacks of thick diaries, covers the walls of her cell with furiously scribbled poetic sentences telling of possession, pain and control. The doctor is increasingly fascinated by this waste of creative talent, enviously admires her, and is determined to possess her. The increasingly unbearable sexual tension in conjunction with Brenner’s bizarre treatments and the horror of straitjackets and shock therapies swell into a pandemonium from which there is no escape.

The Scandinavian leads play their roles with frightening intensity. The camera registers and precisely dissects every movement, tells a story in images of disturbing beauty. The film is based on the diaries of Géza Csáth, Hungary’s famous first neurologist, just as the director’s earlier WITMAN FIÚK adapted a novella by the same writer.