I Would Like to See It: Witchhammer

An altar boy sees an old beggar woman (Lola Skrbková) steal the host during mass. When he tells the priest (Jiří Holý), he sets off a chain reaction of suspicion and petty grudges which culminates in the devastation of the parish and the surrounding holdings of Countess de Galle (Blanka Waleská) by a ruthless, cynical inquisitor, sir Boblig von Edelstadt. Over the course of the film sir Boblig strips local landowners, merchants, and clergy of their property and wealth under the pretext of uncovering an occult conspiracy rooted within the surrounding countryside, deploying torture and coercion indiscriminately against the mighty and the weak alike. It’s Boblig’s story in the end, the decoy protagonist, principled deacon Kryštof Lautner (Elo Romančík, eerily reminiscent of Matthew Rhys in the mid 2000s), slowly fading into the background as it becomes clear how thoroughly Boblig’s methods strip away anyone and everyone’s best qualities, reducing them to stuttering, sobbing husks capable only of following a coached verbal path to the promise of an end to the relentless onslaught of pain.

As compelling as Romančík is in his proto-Father Grandier inThe Devils role, Boblig is the one whose private life we see most intimately. It’s his relationships, both with his fellow members of the inquisitorial court and his manservant Ignac (Josef Kemr), which have the most space to breathe, and which are as nuanced beneath the petty cruelty and proud ignorance which drive all his actions as Lautner’s melancholy dignity, or his shamed but still tender and unwavering affection for his maid and one-time lover Zuzana (Soňa Valentová). Where The Devils, the film’s clear thematic and structural descendent, is outsize and sensational, lurid and grotesque, Witchhammer remains firmly rooted in the dreadful mundanity of each atrocity it depicts. It isn’t barrel-chested Oliver Reed who goes to the stake with Christ-like forgiveness for his murderers and a message of love and warning for his one-time flock, but a series of twisted, broken bodies, largely silent, which might once have passed for human beings.

The film’s depictions of torture are horrific in their simplicity. Thumbscrews. The Spanish boot. The rack. The most basic principles of physics conspire with Boblig’s cheerfully smug willingness to twist any single word or motion into proof of infernal influence in his victims. A prisoner falling unconscious or jerking in pain becomes “a nod, equivalent to verbal confession”. Refusal to confess becomes proof that the Devil shields the victim from their torments. In his asides, as he feasts and drinks and laments his bad back and weak heart, he displays a brutal, cunning frankness, a desire to burrow as low as humanly possible into the dark, fertile soil of paranoid stupidity in order to emerge on the far side with fistfuls of confiscated gold, leveraging noble and ecclesiastical grudges and popular panic to enrich himself like an idiotic tick who has discovered by chance the one place on the body humans can’t seem to reach to pluck him off. It’s a quiet film, in spite of its grisly subject matter, but one which seems no less timely now than it must have when it first premiered in the midst of the Cold War.