“I am a loner. A destroyed woman. I have a choice – to kill myself or to kill others. I choose TO PAY BACK MY HATERS . . . My verdict is: I, Olga Hepnarová, the victim of your bestiality, sentence you to death.”
Thus ran the letters sent to Prague newspapers in July, 1973, two days after Czechoslovakian mass murderer Hepnarová killed eight people with a truck. Debuting writer-directors Tomas Weinreb and Petr Kazda have incorporated Hepnarová’s writing into this magnificently austere biopic of the last woman to receive the death penalty in Czechoslovakia.
There are few time stamps – save when she bobs her hair as an adult – in this painstaking chronicle of pathology. Jobs, girlfriends, and crippling bouts of depression seem to run into each other.
An early suicide attempt is met with maternal scorn: “To commit suicide you need a strong will, something you certainly don’t have.” Rather horrifically, her mother proves to be one of the more sympathetic players. The film’s anti-heroine is soon brutalised by the other girls at a psychiatric unit. Adulthood is characterised by drifting between jobs as a bus driver and, later, fatefully, a truck driver. Friendships or human contact of any kind is rare and when it happens – as it does with an older man called Miroslav (Martin Pechlat) – it is strange and ill-defined. Psychiatrists are repeatedly visited to no avail.
There is momentary relief from her debilitating isolation and ennui when she comes out as a lesbian. Her loud, explicit encounters allow us to glimpse the possibility of a less grim Olga; instead her sexuality is a conflicted affair. Describing herself as a “sexual cripple”, her self-loathing and lack of self-care work to drive her various lovers away.
DOP Adam Sikora's rigid monochrome tableaux are deceptively tumultuous: the camera lingers in an empty hallway as we see Olga's father leaving her childhood bedroom; we watch her staring silently only to realise, she's stalking someone. Michalina Olszanska, the Polish star of cannibal-mermaid-musical The Lure, brings a million-mile stare to her discombobulating central turn. Echoing the ethical complexity of Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing, Weinreb and Kazda offer no easy conclusions, only cruel, confusing realities.
