The Cremator

While it’s a bit programmatic for my taste, this 1968 black comedy in black and white is undeniably creepy — once director Juraj Herz enters the fractured mind of his protagonist, he refuses to budge. Based on a novel by Ladislav Fuks (who cowrote the screenplay with Herz) and set in Prague before and during the German occupation, it concerns a smugly bourgeois crematorium operator (Rudolf Hrusinsky) who loses his sanity and drifts into collaboration with the Nazis, ultimately turning on his half-Jewish wife and their children. An outlying figure of the Czech New Wave, Herz demonstrates an undeniable flair for telegraphic, almost subliminal editing and deep-focus mise en scene. In Czech with subtitles. 95 min. (JR)

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