Film reviews

Gallicia (northern Spain), 1851: it is a time when science and superstition ride side by side, and when even men of advancement proclaim their theories as though they are attested by every known piece of evidence and all the angels of heaven. In this time and in this place, a remote region whose natural splendours of woods, mountains and waterfalls provide an unlikely stage for the events that follow, something terrible is happening…

The people of the region are cautioned not to venture into the woods alone. Four bodies have been found, horribly mutilated, apparently the victims of wolves. Living in the area are two sisters, María and Bárbara, along with María’s daughter Teresa. Their isolation is enlivened by the arrival of María’s lover, a travelling salesman called Manuel Blanco Romasanta. He is a man of quiet authority and compelling attractiveness, an apparently deep-thinking and courteous man of strength and deep passions. It is immediately apparent that Bárbara feels an unacknowledged but burgeoning interest in him, and María takes swift steps to put a stop to this by making arrangements to go to a new town with Manuel and Teresa, leaving her sister behind.

The family tensions are beautifully portrayed, with a stunning long shot that focuses on María’s face as she observes her lover giving her sister a comforting hug in the stable after a confrontation with a wolf. But ever present in the background is the growing concern of what is behind the wolf attacks…

District Attorney Luciano de la Bastida is assigned to investigate the deaths, and when he invites renowned medical man Professor Phillips (whose main expertise appears to be psychiatry) to examine some of the cadavers (far more than four – four was the number that they COULDN’T hide from the populace), the horrifying truth is revealed. Some of the wounds are savage bites, yes… but some are cuts made by a knife. These are murders… and worse. For further investigation shows that the killer had for some unknown reason removed all the body fat from his victims’ thighs and buttocks.

As this revelation is made, Manuel has arrived back at the house where now only Barbara is living. He tells her that all is well with her sister and niece, and the film segues into his irresistible seduction of her. The charm and attraction of Manuel Romasanta is frighteningly well portrayed by Julian Sands, who sniffs erotically at the scent of Bárbara’s skin, and in an infamous bath scene, succeeds in completing his seduction. The effectiveness of this scene is in both its sensuousness and its horror – as his sensitive hands lather her, we can guess all too well from what the soap is made.

After a stranger in the woods – a tormented Antonio, erstwhile companion in horrible crimes with Manuel – aims a bullet at Manuel and hits Bárbara instead (as she spots the glint of the rifle and is desperate to protect her lover), Manuel’s emotions move into a new gear. In his softly sensuous voice, he later tells Bárbara that this was when he knew he loved her. “My life belongs to you”, he says.

But the sudden discovery that Bárbara makes – that Manuel has in his possession a necklace belonging to one of the murder victims – causes her to have the gravest fears for her sister and niece. Her investigation of his wagon confirms her terrors. They must be dead. Manuel is not the man of restrained nobility of purpose she had supposed. While she lay copulating with her sister’s ex-lover, her sister and niece were lying dead in the forest, brutally and savagely murdered by one they thought they could trust. As Bárbara seeks out the now vanished Romasanta, her thoughts are caught in a vice. Revenge, love. Love, revenge. Even burning the sheets of the bed on which she lay with him will not remove the stain of guilt from her, and it is this guilt that deepens her rage.

There are many scenes that will stay with the viewer – the bird deliberately blinded by Manuel, the way in which gruesome bodies are not included in frame but referenced by a quiet “Christ!” muttered by the District Attorney, the strangely luminous eyes of the wolf inside the rustic church, the imagined transformation scene from wolf to man, and perhaps above all, the final confrontation between Bárbara and Manuel.

While deliberate ambiguity is maintained throughout the film, it’s clear that here is a tale not so much of a werewolf, but of a man who falls into a blood-lust frenzy in which he believes himself to be a wolf, conscienceless, behaving as though by instinct, permitted every savagery. Julian Sands said of the film that it was an “exciting, strange, ambivalent gothic fable”. His acting is a wonderful piece of understated complexity, with a look in the eyes expressive of sudden purpose, madness, torment and power. The music score is beautiful and apt throughout, and the period feel of the film is excellently maintained.

“I said my life belongs to you. Now my death is yours… and death lasts forever.” A sombre thought for a thought-provoking film. Highly recommended.