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Very disappointing...

Great Film overall

Fresh and Exciting

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This odd, calm, unnerving Czech movie is not for the faint of heart. It's not for those who mind some slow stretches, either. Still, there is a masterful, upsetting, sad, frightening and crazy-as-a-loon ending that brings the movie back sharply into focus Kopfrkingl is the director of the town's only crematorium, a business his father started 40 years earlier. The place is Czechoslovakia just before WWII. Nazis and their Czech collaborators are soon to take over. Kopfrkingl is a sincere man, a bit pudgy, in early middle age who is dedicated to the services he provides. He thinks of his crematorium almost as a temple. He's married to the woman he met at the panther cage in the zoo. He has two children. He dotes on them all. He has an elderly Jewish doctor check his blood every month to make sure, he says, that he has caught nothing from his corpses. He's probably more worried about catching something from his favorite prostitute he visits every month. He is teaching a young, new assistant the procedures of the crematorium. We see all this in the first twelve minutes of the movie...and if these first twelve minutes of Spalovac Mrtvol (The Cremator) don't capture you, then you're no connoisseur of the odd and unsettling. For that matter, if Rudolf Hrusinsky's portrayal of Kopfrkingl doesn't capture you with his quiet voice and solicitude, then you're no connoisseur of odd and unsettling characters. "Cremation is humane," Kopfrkingl tells his 14-year-old son, Mili, his 16-year-old-daughter, Zina, and us, "It rids people of the fear of death. Dear children, do not fear cremation." Death is just the liberation of the soul. The purity of cremation brings purity to the soul. Only 75 minutes in the oven and the cremator has returned dust to dust, and without the messiness that the other way guarantees. It will be only a matter of time before Kopfrkingl's Czech friends with pure German blood show him that a new order is needed to bring purity and rectitude. His crematorium will give his life its own purpose and purity that was meant to be. An hour into the movie we learn how calm and monstrous he is. Since Kopfrkingl is, of course, as crazy as a loon...a calm, soothing loon. He combs a corpse's hair, then without a thought combs his own hair with the same comb. Kopfrkingl's calmness comes from the certitude that what he does serves a noble purpose. There is tenderness but without compassion, morals but without morality, love but without commitment, belief but with nothing but derangement. Did I mention...his wife had a Jewish grandmother and his children are now classified as part Jews? To be cleansed, we all must die. "Frost burns the flowers' flush cheeks, and the Angel of Death takes his toll." The Cremator is not at all a black comedy. It's more an ironic funeral dirge. Once we get the point that the director, Juraj Herz, sets up for us, there's not much more to develop. What's left is to watch how things play out. An hour into the movie we realize things will not play out well for almost anyone. In a strange and perhaps unplanned reversal of symbolism, the Nazi slaughter of Jews involving the efficient use of crematoriums becomes a metaphor for Kopfrkingl's looniness. Shouldn't it be the other way around? By the end of the movie, it is. Give this movie a chance and I think you'll be rewarded.

It's clear almost from the very beginning that the main character (THE CREMATOR himself) is... a tad odd. He's "too good to be true." This proves to be the case, in short order: his ghoulish fascination with a wax museum's chamber of horrors gives us an unsettling glimpse beneath his carefully-constructed facade. He takes too much delight, too, in "releasing the spirits of the dead" in his so-called "temple of the dead." When it's mentioned that the Nazis are nearing the small town, he's easily (perhaps much too easily) persuaded to join derr Cause. (It's this unsettling willingness to pitch in and help in the mass murder of innocent victims that both sounds the lone false note in the otherwise sound narrative while likewise lending the proceedings an absolutely unforgettable ghoulishness. The Cremator seems too easily convinced, on the one hand; yet, it also seems to be perfectly in keeping with his all too clearly delineated schizophrenic character.) His own, personal Final Solution to the question of what to do about the other members of his family makes this one a horror film to the (rotten) core and, like Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO before it, THE CREMATOR is superbly crafted. Recommended.

Juraj Herz's The Cremator, lost to Western audiences for many years before being recently rediscovered by the Brothers Quay, is an extraordinary surreal meditation on the political horror of 1930s Europe. Hrusínský's remarkable title performance literally and figuratively fills the screen, an alarming depiction of a deceptive and compulsive character slowly inhabited by Nazi political dogma. In some respects The Cremator recalls Polanski's claustrophobic nightmare Repulsion, though this is arguably even further out than Polanski could manage. Utterly devastating but incredibly watchable (the 90 minute running time passes in a heartbeat), this is a real find. I posted this comment because I was aware that the only other comment on the film was negative, and I really do believe it is worth your time checking this out.

This film is everything else but the comedy! It shouldn't be funny in any case! It builds up an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear in an excellent way. The Rudolf Hrusinsky's lead character is superb. He is a kind of psychopathic personality blindly struggling for the maintaining order and meeting of commands regardless any consequences. In the context of Nazism it leads to destruction of his own family - his wife is a Jew. Not surprising that Kopfrkingl is on stage during every second of the film. The film is about his thoughts, reveals his mind processes, observes his perverted logic. A knowledge of the II World War history as well as Ladislav Fuks's (writer) genial artwork is helpful to understand this masterpiece.