I’m again a long time between episodes of my nominally weekly horror podcast, partly due to difficulty finding a copy of the current movie that I could watch, but I think mostly due to being sick for the greater part of a month and falling behind on podcasts in general. I know one of the categories was revenge, but I don’t remember if that was the style or the monster, and I cannot remember what the other category was at all. (One supposes if I could, I’d also know which was which.) But I think revenge must be the monster die. Style could be a lot of things, but this is a 1973 anime named Belladonna of Sadness, so one supposes the style was Asian, or animated films, or not very plausibly 1970s. Just because of the glut of revenge movies from that decade, I mean.

Of course, I could be wrong about any of these facts, aside from what the movie was I mean. I’d check, but I’ve written way too much for that to make sense at this point.

There was a movie, I was saying. If I’m being real, I have no way to usefully talk about this movie without massive spoilers. Here’s what I can say before I reach that line: Belladonna of Sadness is a wildly stylized and yet minimally animated[1] movie about a medieval European, probably French, village in which a very much in love couple gets married, like you do, but then nothing whatsoever goes well for them for the remainder of the flick.

Okay, I’m not going to explain the plot point by point, because for one thing I don’t think I could anyway, but either way, definitely spoilers from here on in. Cut below the footnote.

[1] In the sense that there isn’t a lot of animation. There’s a lot of art, which the camera pans across, and sometimes small pieces of the art move in small ways. And sometimes it goes crazy. But mostly: very minimalist, from an animated perspective.

Obstacles which Jean and Jeanne must and yet assuredly do not overcome include:

Prima Noctis
Witchcraft
More phalluses than you can shake a… I’ll just cut down that sentence in its prime, shall I?
The Black Plague
Jealousy
A weird disco beat futuristic interlude for no apparent reason
Taxes
Implausible names
Satan himself, apparently, who can be a real dickhead

Ultimately, I think this is a movie about futility. Doesn’t matter how far you go, doesn’t matter who’s in your corner. When the deck is stacked against you, you lose. Which is just not a theme I’m used to seeing, here in the land of Hollywood and infinite guns.

Oh, but also in case it was not clear reading between the lines and if you might otherwise watch this movie but would have regrets later: be warned that it is extremely and repetitively rapey like wow.