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Although I haven’t seen a great deal of Czech New Wave films, the few I have seen show an immensely impressive amount of talent, with a level of innovation equal to, if not greater than, the comparable film movements in France and Italy taking place at around the same time.

Produced toward the end of what I understand to be the “golden age” of the Czech New Wave period (the 1960s), Juraj Herz’s The Cremator is a film which is as bleak and angry as you will ever see, but at the same time has an outstanding level of technical sophistication and sense of flow which make it very watchable. Set in 1930s Prague on the eve of the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia, the films centers on cremator Karel Kopfrkingl (played to creepy and genuinely unsettling perfection by Rudolf Hrusinsky), who goes from effusive family man to enthusiastic Nazi collaborator.

Photographed in stark black and white, The Cremator is a truly marvellous piece of innovative, immersive cinema. As well as the quality of the cinematography, the editing is really interesting, with the film flowing from one scene to the next with hardly any cuts to black. When the film moves to a new scene, it will typically cut/zoom to a close up of a person’s face or an object, before the camera pulls out again to reveal that we are in a different location or time. This approach gives the film an eerie, dream-like, unpredictable quality that I have rarely seen attempted in films before or since.

The Cremator is not a film with a simplistic “good man turned bad” arc; for starters, Kopfrkingl is not what you would call a “good man”, even before the Nazi takeover. He is an arrogant man with delusions of grandeur, aloof with his family and also a complete hypocrite: despite his repeated protestations that he is a teetotal, dedicated family man, he is shown drinking, hitting on co-workers and sleeping with prostitutes. With this in mind, the film becomes more a parable about the fear and hatred lying dormant within regular people, and how determined and ruthless political operators can weaponise this for their own corrupt benefit. To this end, Kopfrkingl’s immediate absorption of Nazi ideology and unthinking, barely prompted condemnation of friends, colleagues and even family members shows that the fascist mindset that was boiling away inside him all along, just waiting for release. His enthusiasm is such that, in a moment of the bleakest of bleak comedy, his Nazi handler is taken aback by Kopfrkingl’s voluminous delight at being tasked with constructing the gas chambers that will send millions to their deaths- the increasingly concerned handler has to remind Kopfrkingl several times that he needs to keep this top secret, as though there is a danger that if not so reminded, his charge will start shouting the plans from the rooftops. The film takes Kopfrkingl’s descent into madness to its furthest possible degree: from the brutal murders of his family members to a bizarre scene where Kopfrkingl appears to morph into Hitler himself.

The film describes not only the ways in which ordinary people are capable of terrible evil, but also the ways in which they twist, bend and corrupt their own personal ideologies and value systems in order to justify their actions. This can be seen here in the way in which Kopfrkingl frequently cites his philosophy (based on his obsessive reading of a book he owns about Buddhism) that his job as a cremator is holy; that he, as he sees it, is responsible for freeing souls from their earth-bound vessels. As the film progresses, he begins to see visions of himself as some sort of incarnation of the Dalai Lama, and ultimately he will use this philosophy as a justification for his involvement in the concentration camps.

A deeply disturbing film with a worrying level of contemporary relevance, The Cremator is unforgettable and impossible to turn away from- this truly is absolutely essential viewing.