This Danish short feature has a very interesting story idea that offers all kinds of possibilities, but then it does not make use of the best of those opportunities. It ends up being at about the level of the many routine melodramas of the era, but it's still interesting for the imagination of the film-makers in trying to combine the story and themes in a different way.
The setup has a husband and wife acting team preparing to play the roles of Othello and Desdemona, while in 'real life' the wife pursues an extra-marital romance. The actor playing Iago has his own advances to the wife refused, so he decides to take revenge accordingly. From there, the story follows the characters both on-stage and off-stage as events develop further, with the occasional use of props and other details to develop some of the parallels.
The parallel between play and reality was an imaginative and ambitious idea for the time, and even though it does not work as well as it could have, they deserve credit for trying to make what would have been something like a more serious counterpart to the "Kiss Me Kate" plot. The stage sequences also preserve a brief record of the kind of costumes that the characters would have worn in a stage production at the time.
In Shakespeare's plot, Desdemona is completely innocent and sympathetic, but here the audience's identification with the wife is dissipated by her deceitfulness and coldness. Likewise, in Shakespeare, you can admire Iago's evil brilliance even as you are repulsed by the character, but here he's just a mean-spirited tattle-tale. So, unfortunately, the way it is set up limits or prevents much of the tension and suspense that could have been developed. In the end, it's more interesting for what it could have been, rather than for what it is.
