User Reviews

The 1960s were an interesting time for Czechoslovakian cinema. It seems that they were making some amazing films about WWII and the Nazi era. I think the best of these was "The Shop on Main Street" but "Closely Watched Trains" was also an intriguing film. As for "The Cremator", it, too, is very good--but it's one you might have to force yourself to stick with, as the film, stylistically, is hard to love. But you need to stick with it--it's worth your time.

The first thing I noticed about this movie was its deliberately 'artsy' style. Too many oddly framed closeups and an insistence on a roving camera made me initially hate the film. However, over time it began to grow on me. "The Cremator" is the story of Kopfrkingl---a really weird guy who loves his job of running the crematorium just before Czechoslovakia was absorbed by the Nazis in 1938. He is very philosophical and really loves the Tibetan "Book of the Dead". As a result, he believes his job is freeing souls from suffering so that they can be reincarnated to a better life. He also slowly comes to embrace the upcoming Nazi regime--a problem since his wife is half-Jewish. This problem their children slowly come to haunt this loving family man.

What I liked was not only the weird places the plot goes and how Kopfrkingl solves his problem with Nazis, but the creepy way he's portrayed. I loved his use of the comb throughout the film--you just have to see it to know what I mean. It is truly an unusual and inventive plot. Strikes against it are the camera-work as well as the clothing and fashions. Yes, once again the history teacher within me rears its ugly head, but the folks in the film did NOT look like they were from 1938 but the 1960s. Their hair and clothes were all wrong--odd details to have missed and probably something that won't bother the less detail-obsessed out there. Still, overall it's very worth seeing--just force yourself to stick with this one despite its rather flat beginning.

"The Cremator" is a film that is dark and unforgettable with its horrifying images. At times it's an extremely dark comedy, but mostly a psychological horror satire. In Wold War II Czechoslovakia, Kopfrkingl is a rich and wealthy cremator. He's obsessed with his job to the point of sadistic insanity. He thinks that cremating people is a way to free them for the afterlife. His hunger for power causes him to join up with the Nazi occupiers. That's when he really goes nuts, he even thinks his family needs to be killed; including his son Milli for being too flamboyant. He takes over the crematory by murdering the head director. He longs to build a larger crematorium, where he can pretty much dispose of anyone not living up to the Reich's standards. Again in his own sick mind, he wants to free them for the afterlife and reincarnation. The film is extremely disturbing in it's psychological atmosphere. Director Juraj Herz builds tension as the film progressively gets worse as it goes on. Amazing cinematography, surreal images and a hallucinatory feel. Herz has created a masterpiece that still remains undiscovered to many. Also the film was pretty groundbreaking for its time with its sexual content and macabre violence. So watch "The Cremator"; it's worth tracking down a copy.

This odd, calm, unnerving Czech movie is not for the faint of heart. It's not for those who mind some slow stretches, either. Still, there is a masterful, upsetting, sad, frightening and crazy-as-a-loon ending that brings the movie back sharply into focus

Kopfrkingl is the director of the town's only crematorium, a business his father started 40 years earlier. The place is Czechoslovakia just before WWII. Nazis and their Czech collaborators are soon to take over. Kopfrkingl is a sincere man, a bit pudgy, in early middle age who is dedicated to the services he provides. He thinks of his crematorium almost as a temple. He's married to the woman he met at the panther cage in the zoo. He has two children. He dotes on them all. He has an elderly Jewish doctor check his blood every month to make sure, he says, that he has caught nothing from his corpses. He's probably more worried about catching something from his favorite prostitute he visits every month. He is teaching a young, new assistant the procedures of the crematorium. We see all this in the first twelve minutes of the movie...and if these first twelve minutes of Spalovac Mrtvol (The Cremator) don't capture you, then you're no connoisseur of the odd and unsettling. For that matter, if Rudolf Hrusinsky's portrayal of Kopfrkingl doesn't capture you with his quiet voice and solicitude, then you're no connoisseur of odd and unsettling characters.

"Cremation is humane," Kopfrkingl tells his 14-year-old son, Mili, his 16-year-old-daughter, Zina, and us, "It rids people of the fear of death. Dear children, do not fear cremation." Death is just the liberation of the soul. The purity of cremation brings purity to the soul. Only 75 minutes in the oven and the cremator has returned dust to dust, and without the messiness that the other way guarantees. It will be only a matter of time before Kopfrkingl's Czech friends with pure German blood show him that a new order is needed to bring purity and rectitude. His crematorium will give his life its own purpose and purity that was meant to be. An hour into the movie we learn how calm and monstrous he is.

Since Kopfrkingl is, of course, as crazy as a loon...a calm, soothing loon. He combs a corpse's hair, then without a thought combs his own hair with the same comb. Kopfrkingl's calmness comes from the certitude that what he does serves a noble purpose. There is tenderness but without compassion, morals but without morality, love but without commitment, belief but with nothing but derangement. Did I mention...his wife had a Jewish grandmother and his children are now classified as part Jews? To be cleansed, we all must die. "Frost burns the flowers' flush cheeks, and the Angel of Death takes his toll."

The Cremator is not at all a black comedy. It's more an ironic funeral dirge. Once we get the point that the director, Juraj Herz, sets up for us, there's not much more to develop. What's left is to watch how things play out. An hour into the movie we realize things will not play out well for almost anyone. In a strange and perhaps unplanned reversal of symbolism, the Nazi slaughter of Jews involving the efficient use of crematoriums becomes a metaphor for Kopfrkingl's looniness. Shouldn't it be the other way around? By the end of the movie, it is. Give this movie a chance and I think you'll be rewarded.

It's clear almost from the very beginning that the main character (THE CREMATOR himself) is... a tad odd. He's "too good to be true." This proves to be the case, in short order: his ghoulish fascination with a wax museum's chamber of horrors gives us an unsettling glimpse beneath his carefully-constructed facade. He takes too much delight, too, in "releasing the spirits of the dead" in his so-called "temple of the dead." When it's mentioned that the Nazis are nearing the small town, he's easily (perhaps much too easily) persuaded to join derr Cause. (It's this unsettling willingness to pitch in and help in the mass murder of innocent victims that both sounds the lone false note in the otherwise sound narrative while likewise lending the proceedings an absolutely unforgettable ghoulishness. The Cremator seems too easily convinced, on the one hand; yet, it also seems to be perfectly in keeping with his all too clearly delineated schizophrenic character.) His own, personal Final Solution to the question of what to do about the other members of his family makes this one a horror film to the (rotten) core and, like Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO before it, THE CREMATOR is superbly crafted. Recommended.

The Cremator follows Kopfrkingl, a man who runs a crematorium, as he devolves from minor oddball to full-blown lunatic. A dabbler in Tibetan Buddhism, he eventually comes to believe that, through cremation, he is liberating the souls of those individuals from the suffering they endure on earth. As the Germans, under Hitler, move into the country, Kopfrkingl has little difficulty merging his salvation ideology with the ethnic purification aims of the Third Reich. He is told that his wife is (or at least may be) Jewish, so he "saves" her by hanging her and having her cremated. Since his wife is (or might be) Jewish, so too are his children; Kopfrkingl promptly sets off to "liberate" their souls as well. As this all unfolds, Kopfrkingl increasingly experiences visions of an Asian monk who tells him that his good work at liberating souls will result in him becoming the next Dali Lama. In the end, the Germans take power and offer Kopfrkingl the opportunity to run the gas ovens at the concentration camps, which he accepts happily, as this will allow him to liberate souls all the more efficiently.

The movie comes highly acclaimed, both critically and by its fans (who likely are self-selecting into the film). The Cremator is shot well, with eerie, gothic cinematography, and Kopfrkingl is quite well acted, as he must be, seeing as most of the movie is a series of monologues by him. Big picture, you can have any number of discussions about the meaning of the film, whether as a caustic satire of the Holocaust and the ideas that caused it, as a dig at the ability of malleable, incompletely formed ideologies to accommodate and/or rationalize evil with little difficulty, or as a critique of the complicity of seemingly ordinary locals participating in horrific crimes against humanity.

But, for whatever reason, the film didn't leave me as wowed as it did many other reviews. I saw little comedy in it and would be hard pressed to describe it as a dark comedy. Instead, it came across as a satirical, almost absurdist depiction of derangement as it unfolds, with occasional bouts of boredom. I really wanted to love it, but it didn't land for me. Perhaps you'll love it.