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In a Glass Cage (1987)

Dir: Agustí Villaronga

A failed suicide attempt (after torturing, hanging and beating a young boy to death, he jumped off the roof of his house) leaves exiled Nazi war criminal Klaus (Günter Meisner, “The Boys from Brazil“) completely paralysed and doomed to spend the rest of his life lying inside a huge Iron Lung (with glass windows in the top) which breathes for him and from which only his head protrudes.
Klaus’s abuse of his final victim and attempted suicide was, unbeknownst to him, witnessed by someone else, someone who also took Klaus’s horror filled note books.
Klaus’s ‘job’ during the war was to experiment on young children, something he took much more than a corrupted scientific interest in because he is also sadistic Paedophile who sexually tortured and abused his ‘subjects’ for his own extracurricular pleasure.

Klaus lives in his gloomy mansion house with his Wife Griselda (Marisa Paredes) and young Daughter Rena (Gisèle Echevarría).
Griselda is bitter at having to look after her Husband and gets to (dangerously) resent him more and more each day.
Then one morning a young man named Angelo (David Sust) arrives at the house, pushes his way into Klaus’s room and before Griselda can do anything he has ‘persuaded’ the Nazi to give him the job of Nurse.
Griselda does not trust the strange, intense young man and wants to know why Klaus wants him to stay. Klaus will not answer and will not change his mind making Griselda suspicious and even more resentful, as a strange desire tinged hate for Angelo grips her.

The first night in the house Angelo makes his intentions known. He comes into Klaus’s room opens up the Lung and lies on him, watching as Klaus gasps for air before breathing into his mouth and filling the Nazi’s lungs with his own breath. Angelo kisses his way down the man’s crippled form and recounts the atrocities that Klaus performed and lets it be known he knows all the old man’s vile secrets.

Angelo soon holds sway over the household (with young Rena becoming closer and closer to him) and after putting a few twisted plans into operation he makes the besotted, but terrified, Klaus an offer he can’t refuse; a chance to re-live his crimes, to once again have young boys powerless before him, only this time it will be Angelo in control….

 

After a brief European release Agustí Villaronga’s highly controversial film pretty much dropped into obscurity only resurfacing again on bootleg VHS where it grew a small but enthusiastic and respectful cult following.
The news of it’s DVD release in 2004 (from ‘Cult Epics’) meant that not only old fans, but also those who had not had the chance to view the movie, could at last see “In a Glass Cage” in a manner more befitting it’s highly praised status.

Coming after the craze in out and out, truly exploitative, ‘Nazisploitation’ had died out, Villaronga’s movie took a far more serious, far more disturbing path in the way it would use the Nazi’s atrocities for it’s storyline.
You won’t see a parade of pubic hair, electro abused nipples, rapist beast men, corpses shoved in ovens, orgies or any of the other exploitation mainstays of Nazi based movies. What you will find is grim reality, not only in what is shown but also in the actors Villaronga chooses to use (bravely, but contentiously) to portray the victims…children.

The first victim drinks his milk, clutches an apple to his chest and smiles trustingly, only to find himself suddenly being shouted at, pushed , shoved and made to strip off his top before being tied to a chair and having a slow and painful death injected into his tiny chest via a gas-filled syringe.
And the serious, deadly, deadly serious way these events are filmed and acted means there is no cheesy and/or over the top ‘Exploitation/Trash’ safety valve for the audience, this is grim, realistic and utterly heartbreaking film making. And on that level it does exactly what it is meant to do and does it chillingly well.
It’s clinical, sadistic and deeply disturbing in it’s style and for the fact that this is no older actor standing in for a child, or a child used in a scene where we never actually see anything. Instead we witness it all and we witness it being done to a small boy.
Klaus, in his many musings about his time in the death camps announces that he never felt the full pleasure of the children’s deaths because he never looked into their eyes…Villaronga ensures that we, the audience, do look into their eyes.

The children’s parents were on set and had full knowledge, but never the less these scenes are hard to watch and would have almost no chance of being allowed in any kind of mainstream production.
Even the twisted opening where Klaus gazes at the naked, hanging young boy, (with painfully stretched looking arms) and brushes his lips over the child‘s wounds, while his young body swings back and forth, does not fully prepare you for the sequences involving the live children later on.

Away from the films most controversial moments though Villaronga ensures that the rest of his film is also as well made and striking.
The highly effective look of the film (cold blues, silvered whites and deep blacks) draws the viewer into the darkness of not just the impressively bleak house, but also into that of the characters and their existence. It’s top class work from Jaime Peracaula.

Villaronga’s skill and control over his talented crew is shown perfectly during a masterly stalking sequence which is a textbook example of the use of sound, music and cleverly edited visuals to create a terrifying atmosphere of dread and dark expectation in the audience as it waits for the inevitable.
It ends in a ruthlessly calculated murder (and a sadistically wicked aftermath) that may seem like a move into standard ‘Psycho on the loose’ fare but is in fact vital to show that Angelo is not all talk and that he does more than just play mind games. It shows that he truly is capable of doing everything he promises and that we are not in the presence of a simple delusionist, and as such it puts the audience on edge as to what he may indeed be truly capable of.

The biggest success in the film though is the brilliantly written relationship between Angelo and Klaus. Each of them needs the other for what they must go through at this juncture in their lives and as much as Angelo takes control of Klaus the very reason he is even doing what he is doing, and even why he is the person he has become, is all down to Klaus and the power he used to have.
And it is obvious that even with the loss of that actual physical power Klaus still has a complete and total hold over Angelo, right down to his corrupted soul. The relationship is of master and slave and the roles change throughout the film.

Klaus’s initial reluctance to agree to Angelo’s plan belays the dark lust that he later lets himself once again experience as he recounts (or recalls if Angelo is describing the events) the vile experiments and executions he held sway over and took part in. And these explicit passages of dialogue, which almost lovingly describe torture and death, are as strong a jolt to the audience as the events that we actually see.
The relationship is a beautifully, disturbingly, realised look at the ever changing roles of the corrupted and the corrupter.

Another break from the ‘Nazisploitation’ norm (if this film can even be classed as that is actually debateable) also makes the film more disturbingly timeless, and that is the lack of actual Nazi symbolism. Klaus (and later Angelo) sports a long dark coat and black shades, but no Nazi insignia is ever present because this is an attack on (and study of) general fascistic tendencies and culturally birthed murder and genocide, not just that committed by the Nazis.
In fact the idea for the film came from the dreadful mass child murders committed by French Knight Giles De Reis in the 1400’s, and many events after (as well as before) WWII show us that Klaus and Angelo will exist in some from or other until mankind no longer walks this earth.
And in a way the haunting twist at the finale is the most chilling representation of this.

Performances are all superb with Günter Meisner doing an astonishing job given the fact that for most of the film he is only ever seen lying down with his reflection in the mirror above his face.
The young Gisèle Echevarría as Rena gives an excellent performance (especially in the latter stages of the film as Rena truly comes under Angelo’s spell) and her skill belies her years.

David Sust essays Angelo’s fragmented personality (mysterious, calculating, caring, seductive, sadistic, tragic and crazed) with great skill and makes for a memorably chilling sight as he struts about in his long coat and black glasses through the blue tinged, wire swathed, hell he has made inside the house.
The ever changing, moving and ominous score by Javier Navarrete compliments all these performances perfectly.

“In a Glass Cage” then is still as controversial today as it was nearly 20 years ago and still retains the grim, bitter, bleak power to shock.
It’s close to the bone and makes for truly unsettling viewing, but it’s also exceptional in it’s execution, both in front and behind the camera, and will leave you with many unforgettable, though heartbreaking and chilling, thoughts on just how hellish a person’s heart and soul can truly (and easily) become.