Even if you go into this film knowing absolutely nothing about the true story on which it’s based – a shocking mass murder that foreshadowed a recent atrocity in France – you’ll sense something dreadful is going to happen because so much of it is crushingly dull. After all, there’s a kind of algorithm that controls the structure of this sort of austere Euro arthouse cinema. The maths dictate that the viewer must suffer through a certain quantity of pointlessly long shots of people driving, smoking or staring blanking into space, suffused with ennui and alienation, before the film will deliver either sex scenes or acts of violence. In this case, both love and death are portioned out through the story of title character Olga Hepnarová (Michalina Olszanska), a 22-year-old Czech woman driven to violence in 1973 after years of bullying and maltreatment by her family and the then socialist state. Olga also happened to be a lesbian, which allows the film several moodily lit but not exactly convincing scenes where she makes out with a series of fetching temporary girlfriends. The sleek monochrome cinematography dilutes the luridness somewhat, as does the mesmerising Olszanska’s committed performance and somehow her feline beauty makes the deranged, Unabomber-like character she’s playing seem even more disturbing.
