Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)

Madeleine (Christina Lindberg), a young woman, lives on a farm with her parents. She hasn't spoken a single word since she was raped as a girl. Nonetheless she seems shy but content.

Looking at the film's title, this isn't a state that can last very long. Soon she meets the slimy-charming Tony (Heinz Hopf) who exploits her naivety well. After filling Madeleine up with alcohol and invites her into his apartment where he drugs her and starts to hook her on heroin. The friendly chap is a pimp and this is the cheapest way to get more prostitutes and fulfill his final dream of settling down in Switzerland.

While Madeleine is being drugged, Tony also forces her to sign some terrible letters to send to her parents, so full of hatred for them that he thinks they will never try to find her.

Finally, when she is fully hooked, he introduces her first "customer" to her. Madeleine still has a lot of fight inside her, though. She scratches the man's face badly.

Tony isn't amused and cuts out one of her eyes. In the woman's future lie eyepatches and the name of "pirate".

This seems to break her, and she settles into her life of being victimized and abused. Tony even gives her a percentage of her earnings and one free day per week. After all, where is a junkie going to go?

One day Sally (Solveig Andersson), a fellow slave, steals a letter for Madeleine from Tony. It's from her parents and does sound very much like a suicide letter to my ears.

So it is with no great surprise we watch Madeleine finding her parents dead by suicide.

Instead of destroying her completely, her parents' death gives Madeleine a very grim kind of strength and she starts to use her money to pay trainers. Thus the determined woman learns martial arts, shooting and stunt driving.

She takes her time until she achieves something like perfection in the skills necessary for her new chosen profession.

As soon as she is ready, she starts killing her customers one by one and you can be certain she won't forget Tony.

There are a lot of different cuts of Thriller - I saw the 104 minutes version (thankfully) without hardcore inserts, as far as I know this is the cut to watch.

And what an interesting film this is. Sure, the low budget is obvious when one looks at some of the locations and most of the acting that is not done by Lindberg or Hopf is far from brilliant, but those two are the only people in the movie who really need to act, and both are doing their job well enough. Hopf's strange falseness in line delivery and mimic would be more than a little annoying in most roles, here it fits Tony's character perfectly.

Lindberg is probably playing the role of her life.

Bo Arne Vibenius direction is the second star of the movie behind Lindberg. He mostly resists the temptation to sleaze the proceedings up. There is a little nakedness, but not a single moment that tries to milk the story for titillation (that's what the hardcore inserts were for anyway). Instead, the first half of the movie goes for a cool and distanced look at the proceedings; not necessarily a cruel look, more one that trusts the viewer to have emotional responses without being pushed into them.

Which doesn't mean there isn't a strong directorial voice in Thriller. What the film lacks in funds is more than made up by a surprisingly thorough sense of detail, be it in the way Lindberg's wardrobe is color-coded or in the way Tony is never looking at the waiter when he first gets his hands on Madeleine in a restaurant.

The revenge part of the film is even more interesting. Where the first half is hyper-realistic, the second is stylized into the surreal. The "action sequences" consist nearly completely of extreme slow motion shots, as if the world around Madeleine had slowed down to incomprehensibility. Sandwiched between slow-motion death is one of the stranger driving sequences of my career with Madeleine in a stolen police car, pushing lots of cheap, rusty European cars, which of course explode at the slightest provocation, off the road until we are ready for the next slow-down.

The woman's final vengeance is of an archaic cruelty, but also strangely beautiful.

I am a little at a loss what to make of the film. I'd highly recommend it and will certainly watch it again, but I am completely unsure if the movie was meant to feel the way it feels. Did Vibenius use the way the revenge is filmed to show us the state of mind of his protagonist? Or did he use the slow motion overload just to pad out the running time?

I am not even sure if I want to know the answer to that.

 

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