A great film that at first seems to be a film about a psychiatrist, or given it's a French film, who is using hypnotism. But people seem to keep dying around her. Due to her hypnotism practice.
She is approached by a kind of wild man character who lives in the hills and is diagnosed schizophrenic, but all is not what it seems.
He turns to her to relieve his physical pain, only for the psychiatrist herself to start having strong erotic dreams full of death, sex and murder, only for life to prove her dreams as prophetic.
There are several other essential characters in the film, including three other clients; an electrician (in lieu of a plumber - a hot scene nonetheless, and to be shallow not too different from either the cover of the album Goddess by the singer Banks, also similar to the tarot card Princess of Wands in the Hermetic tarot deck); another psychiatrist; and a priest.
The film ends in a wild ride, with a build-up of tense scenes, and then more becalmed moments, always slightly tense, with dream-like scenes interspersed to demonstrate (well at that) the fervent state of the sophrosyne, sophisticated woman psychiatrist film lead as she deals with this man of the mountains more brutish, but otherwise artisanal, client.
What may be a deeper hidden MacGuffin here, is if one knows the difference between the English-speaking world's attitude ot schizophrenia and the French, the French are still more psychoanalytically oriented. More than Americans and much more than the British.
So there are several tussles here, obviously male and female domination (a LOT of this play!), urban and rural, sophisticated intellectual and artisan, science and religion (including church and witchcraft), but also psychoanalysis and pharmaceutical science.
The film starts with hypnosis (think here specifically of Sigmund Freud and his rejection of his training in psychoanalysis with Charcot that led to his form of psychoanalysis) and has a rejection of medication, before moving to blatant witchcraft erotic horror.
I can assure you, that the last part is very well done (if I say my PhD covered this historical topic (sort of like a thesis version of both Willem Dafoe AND Charlotte Gainsbourg's characters in Lars Von Trier's The Antichrist) and I have seen some awful portrayals of this type of clash in psychiatry and this is by far the best rendering of this shibboleth I have yet to see, will that help recommend this film?
Really worth watching!
