Effigy: Poison and the City
Why do people do what they do? Don’t expect anyone to ever tell you, or even be able to tell you, especially if they’re a serial killer and especially if they’re a serial killer in a movie. The answer is both obvious and capricious because that’s what people are much of the time. At best we can get some vague protestations of deeper desires which can’t or won’t be examined, perhaps with some esoteric symbolism thrown in to help the individual’s ego. It’s a cover to hide the fact that they don’t know because we don’t know. Introspection is ultimately a distraction in the face of human nature.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s certainly true about this particular flavor of genre fiction, even when gussied up in the trusses of period storytelling and the perfume of being based on a true story. Specifically, the story of Gesche Gottfried (Anbeh), a wife and home maker in 19th century Germany who killed her parents and later children during the cholera epidemic of 1815. At first lauded for helping during the epidemic, she was later accused of poisoning her family leading her to flee and eventually begin killing again. Discovered and arrested, Gottfried had neither motive nor explanation for her accused crimes, which turns into a severe problem for newly arrived senatorial aide Cato Bohmer (Thiemann), one of the few female lawyers in the country, who must prove herself and her position by gathering the evidence to send Gottfried to the executioner.
It’s an old story, within Germany itself and the tropes of crime fiction, and one which has been covered regularly over the centuries including a television version by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Writer-director Udo Flohr stakes out his own track early on, turning it into a fable patriarchal and matriarchal conflict, the difficulties of woman staking their place in the world and the way the strain of that fight twists and changes its participants to the point they lose connection with the people around them: their parents, their children, strangers, and even other women going through similar struggles. Yes, it removes some agency from Gottfried, casting her as a victim who doesn’t always know why she does what she does, but it also keeps itself somewhat vague to leave its rationales in the eye of the beholder.
That puts a lot onto the shoulders of its actresses, particularly Theimann who by process of elimination must take on the definition which Gottfried cannot. She is a regular part of regular society and so both her motivations and actions can be regularly understood and empathized with. Who hasn’t been held back by less qualified superiors or judged unfairly for attributes which weren’t theirs? The complication creates (invents?) a new facet on the story without having to reckon with the more complex issue of Gottfried herself. Why did she do the terrible things she did? There is probably no answer, or nothing any more satisfying than she wanted to and didn’t care about her victims.
In its new takes and focus, Flohr’s work is in its way something new. If Bohmer were revealed not to exist and were merely a hallucination of Gottfried as she tries to rationalize the choices she has made, it would be less inventive than what has been created, but invention is also the way art evolves. Rather than stand on the shoulders of geniuses who have come before and completely repeated the lessons of the past, he’s set out to make something new and in that resolve he has succeeded.
7 out of 10.
Starring Suzan Anbeh, Elisa Thiemann, Christoph Gottschalch, Roland Jankowsky, Uwe Bohm and Marc Optiker. Directed by Udo Flohr.