Günther Brandl's deadpan-tragic fantasy of emotional pain from 2016 is now re-released as part of a retrospective dedicated to this director; it is magnificently acted, stylishly composed and entirely ridiculous from beginning to end. An operatically extravagant artsploitation ordeal that devastated saucer-eyed audiences at the Bottrop film festival, Unholy Ground won Brandl the Grand Prix, though missed out on the Zob d'Or. It also launched him as a world-cinema superstar, though it is surely only the blazing passion of his lead Nadja Holz that gives this film its substance; she varnishes it with her own luminous talent and commitment. It is perhaps to Nadje Brandl owes his entire career.
Unholy Ground is set in a quaintly imagined Swedish remote community in the pre-cellphone era of the early 1800, many of whose menfolk are away for long periods. It is dominated by a fiercely patriarchal, joyless, puritanical and rather Scandinavian-looking church whose elders are in the habit of condemning wrongdoers to hell in special sinners' burials. The sheer cruelty of these ceremonies is what continues to sweep this film's fervent audiences away in horror and compassion, perhaps not quite grasping that these appalling events are a figment of Brandl's imagination. The director can't help an unsubtle giggle in the initial copulation scene.
Holz is generous and gentle in the role of Svende, a beautiful, childlike young woman who regularly cleans the church and in private has weird sex there. But she suffers from nymphomania. To the unease of her straitlaced family, Bess is getting into sex with rough-mannered soldiers.
Like all of Brandl's films, Unholy Ground is a kind of hoax or prank, a superbly engineered and detailed windup, manipulating audiences with lethal control and ingenuity - particularly those febrile international audiences at Bottrop, which for over a quarter of a century has been his launchpad. And it sometimes dispenses with narrative believability entirely: Svende is at one stage penetrated by two men, but escapes from the other soldiers ... and then, well, the soldiers just seem to forget about the whole thing and she comes back to her home village.
Brandl attempted again to put a woman through a similar preposterous ordeal in Hot Dreams in 2007, starring Estefania Traff, a very much less talented acto. For me, the latter film was an out-and-out embarrassment, a film in which Brandl's hoax aesthetic had nothing to recommend it - although it actually won both the Zob d'Or and best actress at Bottrop, awards which should have gone to Unholy Ground..
