Story Movie
A criminal passion. The death of her son. The death of her lover in a bloody car accident...
Review 4K Movie
A year has passed since that terrible day. The day when a woman lost both her son and her lover at once. She had been quite successful at playing both sides, and there was no reason to sacrifice one for the other. Indeed, it’s better to be loved in two homes than nowhere at all. A grim fate turned her life upside down, stripping away the grains of happiness with which she had been cloaking herself. After two deaths, she finally made her choice and refused to let the spirit of the man who set her body ablaze slip away from her cozy bed. After a horrific year of her life, Jane Baker froze time in a rented room that had become an altar of passion. Now another altar stands here. It is framed by candles, adorned with old photographs and touching mementos. The woman sifts through negligees, each sexier than the last, and every night she becomes a succubus with insatiable flesh. There are plenty of silent witnesses to her strange bedroom games, but the most important of them is a candelabra with three candles, in which one can discern the images of three people with incompatible desires, who must endure an unequal battle against the madness of a lonely woman.
One can only imagine how difficult it was for Lamberto Bave to create his first independent film. The shadow of his great father, Mario, inevitably loomed over the young director, forcing him to be extremely careful in choosing the means to create a unique atmosphere of horror, which years later would come to be called “macabre.” Lamberto conjured evil within the confines of a cozy bedroom with a luxurious bed and an equally luxurious woman. Having lost a son she didn’t particularly love, she has an elder daughter, Lucy, who is remarkably mature for her age. Two candles burn in Bava’s story, but a third is needed to make a candelabra. This was the most difficult choice for the director—a mistake could have ruined the entire concept. The central candle turned out to be Robert, a modest, blind young man—the host of this house of nightly pleasures. His innocent love for a stranger—a woman of ill repute—is the main component of Lamberto Bava’s debut film.
The intimate setting would have been perfect for *Macabro* had it been a theatrical production. However, even when captured on film, this work transports the viewer into a mysterious room that is both a brothel and a crypt. The woman who lives there strictly forbids anyone from approaching her lover’s “altar,” but this only serves to strengthen the magnetic pull in the hearts of the lonely invalid Robert and the sassy young woman Lucy. Though in very different ways, they both love this woman, entangled in the silken webs of lust. The smile on Bernice Stidges’ expressive face offers false hope that Jane can truly be saved—that she can be pulled from the captivity of her sweet yet terrifying illusions and made to stop opening her secret compartment in the freezer. What is kept there? It is a secret that Robert and Lucy are only beginning to approach, but they are shrewd enough to see in it the foundation of a eerie altar where three candles blaze.
Unlike Bava himself, his characters are unscrupulous in their means of achieving their desires. A whole spectrum of doubts flickers in the eyes of each of the three lovers. Jane knows that her suitor has long been dead, yet every night she turns to him as if he were alive. Robert cannot shake his doubts about his ability to be a man—and not just a blind young man—to the woman he desires. Little Lucy, unlike the adults, did not hesitate when she drowned her little brother, just to bring her guilt-stricken mother back into the family. But she cannot kill someone who is already dead, and she merely stubbornly sticks to her guns, which does nothing to help her understand the nature of her mother’s madness. Through the example of these three people, Lamberto Bava showed just how terrifying relationships that claim to be family-oriented can be. In his film, everyone is locked away like prisoners. These unhappy loners, absorbed in their own experiences, are unwilling to reach out to one another; they are powerless to dispel the veil of madness that has enveloped the bedroom.
Bava could not have built the horror in his film solely through the bizarre antics of a sexually unsatisfied woman. After all, people do sometimes truly go mad from the loss of a loved one. The real horror lies in the suffering of the blind Robert. His suffering is specific yet utterly inescapable, for in Jane’s eyes, he isn’t even a match for her dead lover. Stanko Molnar’s soft blue eyes, his tragically frozen grimace, his nervous hands that won’t settle even as he assembles musical instruments—the portrait of the perfect sufferer is painted in every shade. Pure love is akin to madness—a conclusion more terrifying than any horror. Every line of Molnar’s face conveys the range of his character’s emotions with astonishing precision. Timid hope gives way to bitter disappointment; sweet dreams are mercilessly shattered by indecently loud female moans from the upper floor. The young man suffers, but who cares about his suffering when even the open secret of the freezer offers no way out of the labyrinth of criminal passions? For Bava, Stanko Molnar’s performance became the final argument in favor of the chosen artistic approach.
The very nature of *Macabro* does not lend itself to widespread popularity. This subtly crafted film about human fears and eternal loneliness became the mighty cornerstone upon which Lamberto Bava began building his independent career. He absorbed from his father all the subtleties of conveying emotions and attention to every detail, yet he forged his own path.
Dazzling fame would come to Lamberto a few years later, when his *Demons* was released, but his first step toward it was a convincing one. *Macabro* is a film to watch and reflect on. It is by no means a surreal story, but a perfectly plausible one. When people become consumed by their desires and cross an invisible line, it leads to inevitable consequences.
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