By Terry Sherwood
Harry Kümel’s Malpertuis (1971) is an odd in European horror, a film that shimmers between textures of Italian giallo and the surreal carnival imagery of Federico Fellini. Where Kümel’s earlier the brilliant decadent Daughters of Darkness luxuriated in vampiric sensuality, Malpertuis moves deeper into dream logic where mythology, decay, together in a Gothic fairy tale. The film has received a 4k restoration recently with lots or archival material with added material that was screened as Director’s Cut at 119 minutes.
The myth like plot concerns a sailor Jan (Mathieu Carrière), returning from sea, is kidnapped after a blow on the head in a club fight and deposited in the sprawling mansion of Malpertuis. There, the tyrannical owner Quentin Cassavius played by a bedridden Orson Welles, decrees that his assembled relatives will inherit his fortune only if they remain trapped in the house forever. Escape is futile; those who try are dispatched with cruel of spikes and attacking ravens. Gradually Jan discovers the grotesque truth: the household’s denizens are no mere heirs, but ancient Greek gods sewn into mortal skins, prisoners of Cassavius’s last mad wish that they mate and revive a god lineage.
A Belgian made picture Malpertuis borrows the look and atmosphere of classic Italian giallo. Its set design revels in lurid contrasts: staircases that twist into infinity, corridors constricted like arteries, red draped chambers glowing like wounds. Shadows are sculpted into menace, and colors burn with the same intensity one finds in Argento or Bava. Kümel doesn’t indulge in giallo’s operatic murders so much as its architecture and color, turning every corridor into a psychological trap and every staircase into a descent.
The violence, when it comes, is not a brutal or sexually oriented to a point as Giallo can be. In this work you get bodies vanishing, deaths implied rather than dwelt upon, but the mood is unmistakably that of a giallo:
Yet Kümel blends the giallo aesthetic with touches of Fellini’s grotesque carnival moments. The streets outside Malpertuis are alive with oddities: one-legged boys who get cruelly treated, blind men pressing against antique glass, processions of figures who seem half-specter, half-clown at a masked party, At times, Malpertuis looks more like a traveling circus that has decayed into ruin, its people trapped forever in performance. This duality of decadent horror with carnival absurdity making it similar to moments in Argento’s original Suspira with its crashing colors and music track
More than anything, Malpertuis is an Alice in Wonderland parable reimagined or correctly done as it was intended as Gothic nightmare. Jan is Alice, tumbling not down a rabbit hole but into a mansion whose staircases rise and fall without logic, Doors open onto impossible rooms, some stripped bare, others lush with fabrics, as if the house itself were a deck of shuffled cards. The sense of disorientation is not incidental: Kümel structures the narrative as a descent into unreality,
Like Alice, Jan is a witness to transformations, most of them embodied in Susan Hampshire’s performance. She plays four women, shifting between personas as though costume changes in a dream. As Nancy, she is gentle and naïve; as Alice, brittle and repressed; as Euryale whose later real name is revealed, a flame-haired goddess with literally petrifying beauty. The great heroic stories have shrunk to household intrigues. It is a cruelly bitter that: Zeus and company reduced to squabbles over inheritance and marital obligation, their divine rage now pettiness.
Mathieu Carrière, as Jan, with his own God like physical appearance blonde hair and profile plays bewilderment almost to a fault, his perpetual scowl undercutting sympathy. Susan Hampshire is magnetic, providing the film’s emotional and sensual charge. The picture also features lovely ensemble work by all the people both as relatives and the servants who also have their own stories of excess. Nudity in the picture is not to titillate but as in Giallo sexually is power or a prelude to death
Malpertuis is not a film that offers clarity. Its logic is twisted, dreamlike, deliberately elusive, a corridor that never leads where you expect. The music is exquisite songs and almost discord music bringing a auditory decadence to even the bawdy club sequences. For some viewers, this will be maddening. For others, it will be intoxicating as it merges giallo’s visual fetishism with Fellini’s carnival of grotesques and Carroll’s logic of drug fueled dream corridors.
Malpertuis screens as part of Frightfest 2025.
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