Jealous of her vapidly "good" sister's popularity, poisonous Viktoria doses pretty Klara's tea with a slow-acting fatal substance. As the latter grows hysterically weak, the former finds success increasingly compromised by guilt, blackmail, and the pesky need to kill others lest she be exposed.
Acting
Iva Janžurová's dual performance is genuinely unhinged.
Cinematography
Saturated nightmare colors that make poison look delicious.
Direction
Herz's operatic cruelty never lets you look away.
Director
Juraj Herz
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Herz was banned from filmmaking after the Soviet invasion and smuggled this out as 'proof of ideological rehabilitation' while actually making something deeply subversive about hidden rot.
The film adapts Aleksandr Grin's symbolist novel but Herz pushed it into full Gothic excess, making it a secret bridge between 1960s Czech formalism and the coming horror wave of the 1970s.
XC
