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The Cremator Movie Review

The Cremator (Spalovac mrtvol) is a 1969 Czechoslovak dark comedy film directed by Juraj Herz and starring Rudolf Hrusinsky. It’s one strange movie.

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“I’ll save them all… the whole world“

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The story is set in 1930s Prague, where the cremator Karel Kopfrkingl lives and works. Kopfrkingl slowly devolves from an odd but relatively well-meaning cremator of the dead into a murderer of his family and mass murderer who runs the ovens at the extermination camps due to the influence of the Nazi party and Tibetan Buddhism, under which he believes his murders are “liberating” the souls of the diseased into a better life

I personally do not gravitate toward odd movies such as this one. I do get their appeal to others, but I am not a fan myself. I respected it, but I never really cared for it. It’s simply too strange for me and also far from engaging as the monologues take way too much runtime and become repetitive and stale.

The film deals heavily with the rise of Nazism, but especially as it relates to Czechoslovakia. Although it was interesting seeing it from that different perspective, most of the film did not deal well with the history behind it all and I was left mostly in the cold about it. It’s concerned with its antagonist way too much.

And he’s definitely memorable and so well performed by Rudolf Hrusinsky in what has to be one of the greatest acting performances coming from this country. He commands the screen throughout, and clearly the best character development is the one devoted to Karel Kopfrkingl, one of the funniest, silliest names in the history of cinema.

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But others all fare much worse and are all rather underdeveloped and forgettable. The Cremator is very well shot, stupendously shot actually in its stark photography, well scored and overall competently made. But my main issue is its tone. It never decides if it wants to be a pure horror movie or a straight comedy. It tries to do both, but it was never funny at all to me because the main character is such a disturbing man. I never knew if I should laugh or be terrified and the movie never knew that either.