Death and the Maiden (1994) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)

Death and the Maiden is a screen adaptation of a taut three-person stage play with very little action, and slow forward movement. It is, in fact, quite a good little political thriller in its own way, but be advised that the thriller and mystery elements are merely an overlay. This is not an entertainment film, but a serious drama laced with social activism, in the manner of the great playwrights of the 20s and 30s.

Inside the house, she is setting out a dinner for two people, calmly at first, but becoming increasingly tense because the second person is not there. She goes to her porch, stares down the road, searching. She listens to a report on her battery-operated radio, and this angers her. A car approaches. It is not the person she was expecting. She grabs a gun, hides her body from sight, tense, frightened, vulnerable.

It turns out that there is no immediate threat. The car in front of her house is not the one she expected, but it is her husband in the passenger seat. He had a flat and was offered a lift by a passer-by.

Great beginning! Very atmospheric, sets the stage perfectly.

As a bit of time transpires, the passer-by and her husband talk, and she becomes increasingly agitated as she listens to them. She goes into the bedroom, packs some clothes and a big wad of money, sneaks out of the house, steals the stranger's car, and drives off. Before she does, we see her changing, and when we see her skin, it is obvious that she has been tortured. She takes the car to a cliff, and pushes it over, destroying it on the rocks and sinking it in the tempest-tossed sea below.

That's the mystery.

What the hell is going on? Why was she so frightened before the men arrived? Why did the presence of the stranger agitate her?

It seems that she was tortured and raped 15 years earlier, and that her torturer may or may not have been the very stranger now in her house. The movie's title, besides reflecting her youth and peril when she was tortured, is directly derived from the fact that the rapes were accompanied by music - Schubert's "Death and the Maiden". The purpose of that torture was to get her to reveal the name of the leader of the underground. She never cracked. The plot is thickened significantly by the facts that the underground leader she never exposed was the young man who is now her husband, and that the husband has now bonded a bit with the erstwhile torturer.

She is certain that the stranger was her torturer - by the voice, the smell, the idioms of his speech - but he steadfastly denies it, and has an ironclad alibi. He was in Barcelona, doing his residency. She doesn't accept his denials, and she wants revenge, or "justice". Her husband realizes that she may well be mentally ill and delusional from the long-term effects of her confinement and torture.

That's the set-up.

Power shifts between the three people. Our opinions change. The truth eventually surfaces. But what is the truth?