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| Images courtesy of Radiance Films |
Belgian filmmaker Harry Kümel established himself in Europe
and the United States as a cult horror filmmaker with his 1971 vampire feature Daughters
of Darkness starring Delphine Seyrig and John Karlen. Set in a Belgian seaside hotel, it was a
psychosexual surrealist thriller of sorts involving a countess in a decayed
setting with androgynous queer leanings and a penchant for gothic folk
horror. Two years later, Kümel was back
with Malpertuis, an adaptation of Jean Ray’s 1943 Belgian
science-fiction/horror novel of the same name involving a crumbling estate
where a dying warlock has trapped aging Olympian gods inside the ‘skins’ of Flemish
civilians.
Originally made in 1971 but recut by the studio before being
screened at Cannes where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or, audiences weren’t
sure what to make of this enigmatic and elliptical haunted house mystery
fable. In 1973, a French ‘director’s cut’
version emerged. Sometime in 2023, the
Royal Belgian Film Archive with the director’s full participation and oversight
scanned both cuts of the film in 4K before reconstructing a new final director’s
cut that is closest to Harry Kümel’s bizarre otherworldly gothic horror vision
now making its worldwide blu-ray disc premiere in a limited boxed set through
Radiance Films.
Jan (Mathieu Carrière) is a young sailor on leave navigating
the streets and bar scene in search of his childhood homestead when he is
knocked out cold in a drunken barfight.
Awakening in a mysterious crumbling and isolated gothic mansion called Malpertuis
commandeered by his sickly uncle Cassavius (an oversized bedridden Orson
Welles) alongside his sister Nancy (Susan Hampshire) and a local maniac named
Lampernisse (Jean-Pierre Cassel). As he
settles into this strangely ancient ghostly setting, Cassavius on his deathbed
presents to his heirs the estate plan which promises enormous wealth but there’s
a caveat in that you can never leave the premises. Anyone who tries to flee the scene usually
ends up dead and as Jan tries to close in on an answer to this every unfolding
mystery, the logic and nature of the film grows increasingly fantastical with
supernatural leanings.
With its lavish, sumptuous production design of ravishing
imagery surrounded by haunted decrepitude, mind blowing beautiful wide-angled
cinematography by The Exorcist III cameraman Gerry Fisher and a steadily
more nightmarish and threatening score by Contempt composer Georges
Delerue, Malpertuis is Belgian gothic horror fable like no other. With its stunning decadent vistas of old
aristocracy and wealth as a kind of inescapable purgatory where participants
can never leave, aspects of it conceptually remind somewhat of Marco Ferreri’s
vulgar shock fest La Grande Bouffe in terms of housing together elites
in an ethereal Hellscape, Malpertuis has the uncanny power of deep sleep
where the closer we come to the waking state the stranger the proceedings get
including but not limited to Greek mythology playing out physically onscreen
like one of the characters breathing fire or turning others to stone.
A kind of companion piece to Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet
Charm of the Bourgeoisie also depicting a group of elites simply trying to
sit down and eat only to have that simple task bizarrely thwarted at every turn
with aspects of the Belarusian gothic horror fable The Savage Hunt of King
Stakh involving a ghostly mansion populated by spirits of the past and
present, Malpertuis tragically unlike Daughters of Darkness found
more difficulty catching on with audiences.
Between its bottomless rabbit holes entwining with one another, a nebulous ever shifting tone, the refusal to abide by ordinary horror
storytelling conventions, Malpertuis simply won’t be boxed in by genre expectations
and branches itself out into new uncharted territory. For anyone interested in folk horror with
Eastern European leanings and screen titans like Orson Welles at the epicenter,
Radiance Films’ release of Malpertuis is an essential pickup for any
adventurous cinephile’s film library, a continuously surprising and genuinely spooky,
lyrical gothic horror fairy tale.
--Andrew Kotwicki
