- Also known as:
- Thriller: A Cruel Picture, Hooker's Revenge, They Call Her One Eye.
- Writer:
- Bo Arne Vibenius.
- Director:
- Bo Arne Vibenius.
- Cast:
- Christina Lindberg, Heinz Hopf.
Madeleine (Christina Lindberg) knows the importance of colour coordinating your eye patch.
Madeleinei (Christina Lindberg) is mute since being raped as a child. One day, she leaves the family farm and follows a man who seemingly can’t stop talking to the city. As you might’ve guessed, it doesn’t end well. The man, Tony (Heinz Hopf), is a pimp who forces Madeleine into prostitution and heroin addiction. After at first refusing, Madeleine soon has her mind changed by a scalpel to the eye. Despite the steady heroin supply, Madeleine doesn’t very much like prostitution, and sets out to get her revenge on Tony and the tricks.
The film has several disturbing shots, not least of which is the close-up of Madeleine’s eye (actually a cadaverii) being cut open by a scalpel. There are also several hardcore penetration inserts when Madeleine is with her tricks. Now, the eye business is hard to watch, but the porn stuff is off-putting. I’m of two minds about the inserts: on the one hand, I’m reasonably sure they’re a marketing gag, on the other hand, they’re so damn ugly they really do add to the brutality of Madeleine’s situation (even if it is a body-double being penetrated). On the third hand, I could live without them; I wouldn’t have like the film any less if they weren’t included.
Madeleine might have problems with depth perception, but she looks cool and that's the important thing.
As you might guess from the explicit sex scenes, we Swedes are better at porn than gore, but I have to say I quite like the action scenes in Thriller. It’s like some kind of avant-garde dance, only with slow motion blood splatter. And Thriller works best when it’s stylised and cartoony. It’s in the dialogue-heavy parts that things tend to fall apart. The dialogue is some of the most ham-fisted exposition-speak I’ve had the misfortune to hear. Fortunately, once the film gets going, there isn’t a lot of talking, but the minute anyone opens their mouth, they manage to dump exposition (often unnecessary exposition) in the most awkward way possible. Dubs or subs may fix this, but the original isn’t pretty.
Christina Lindberg is the saving grace of this film. She’s simply astounding as the mute Madeleine, acting solely through eye-movements and subtle changes of expression. She’s smart enough as an actor to realise that old Kuleshov was right; if she stays subtle, doesn’t over-emote, the viewer will fill in the rest. Not to mention, she looks really cool with an eye patch and a shotgun.
It’s a simple film in many ways, and best enjoyed as such; it’s more a few of cool visuals strung together by a threadbare plot than it is a conversation piece. Though it is interesting that Madeleine is mute, and that it takes Tony so long to noticeiii. I felt, watching the film, as if there was a feminist message just at the edge of my vision and if I tilted my head just right I might be able to see it.
All rape-revenge films can, I think, at least partially be read as empowerment parables, even if the exploitation factor tends to work against a wholly successful feminist reading. In Thriller, there are undoubtedly parts that are exploitive and objectifying, but I also think that any film that puts the viewer on the side of an exploited woman and shows her taking action against her exploiters has some value. If nothing else, the tension between the exploitative and empowering messages is interesting. You could also read Thriller as a parable of class struggle: working class Madeleine is exploited by and strikes back against her bourgeois oppressors. I don’t know that it’s a reading that holds up, but it’s something to ponder while you’re trying to ignore the bad dialogue.
- In some versions known as One Eye or Frigga. ↩
- One of my research notes for this film is: “Where the fuck did they get a cadaver?!” No, I never dared try to find out. ↩
- It’s interesting also that Vibenius worked on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), about an actress who suddenly went mute during a performance of Electra. ↩
