AKA They Call Her One Eye; Hooker’s Revenge; The Swedish Vice-Girl

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DIRECTED BY: Bo Arne Vibenius (as Alex Fridolinski)

FEATURING: Christina Lindberg, Heinz Hopf, Solveig Andersson

PLOT: A young woman rendered mute as the result of a traumatic sexual assault as a child is kidnapped, forcibly addicted to heroin, and made into a prostitute; after further assaults and indignities, she sets about getting revenge.

COMMENTS: We’re 40 minutes in to Thriller – A Cruel Picture before we finally see our heroine claim some power of her own. Up to this point, it has been a deeply disturbing watch, a rendering of  an accumulated and escalating litany of abuses endured by Frigga (sometimes called Madeleine, and always played by Christina Lindberg with the coolest, most emotionally detached demeanor imaginable). We’ve seen Frigga violated as a child, and deprived of her voice as a result of the trauma. We’ve listened to busybody locals talking trash about her. We’ve watched her get kidnapped, beaten, injected with drugs, and chased through the countryside. We’ve seen a parade of monsters treat her as their mindless personal toys. We’ve learned of her parents’ suicides. And we’ve seen the blood-soaked remnants of the closest thing Frigga might have to a friend. It’s a bleak existence, but we take some comfort in knowing that she’s going to be dishing out some serious payback. It feels like classic exploitation territory, a trailblazer for later tales of rape and revenge like Last House on the Left and Ms. 45. So when she steps off the bus and reveals herself in a kicky little red dress with matching leather eyepatch, it’s the first moment that affords some level of hope. She looks ready to deal out some vengeance. Here we go.

But Thriller doesn’t really work that way. The story beats are there, but the rhythm is all off. In the hands of director and co-writer Vibenius (who previously worked as an AD for Ingmar Bergman), everything is very slow, very deliberate, very thorough. We’re trained to expect a certain cake-and-eat-it-too element to these movies; the female lead endures horrific abuse for our entertainment, but with the reassurance that she’ll turn the tables in a big way, providing a cathartic release and making us feel better about all that pain and misery. Thriller never lets go of that early discomfort. That moment with the red dress is actually the start of an act-long training sequence that will run for roughly 25 minutes. Yes, she learns karate and marksmanship, acquires guns and a car, picks up all the tools and she will need to take down those who have wronged her, but this is not a song-driven montage; we get it in toto. We see every moment of the karate lesson, with the instructor demonstrating falls and then Frigga repeating them. We see how she squirrels money away for her eventual escape, but we’re not spared any of the humiliation and degradation heaped upon her by her johns in order to get that precious cash. And when it comes time to saw off the end of a shotgun, we witness every single stroke of the hacksaw. There comes a point when it stops being a story, passes documentary, and becomes a detailed instructional video. It goes from bad to bad, utilizing none of editing’s time-condensing power. Given the horrible ways everyone treats each other, the subtitle A Cruel Film is apt, but the overall tone suggests that the producers could have stuck with the original Swedish: En grym film.

There’s plenty of weirdness behind the scenes. Vibenius supposedly took on the sleazy material in an attempt to recoup some of the money he lost making a treacly family film, and put his thumb on the scale by dropping in scenes of explicit pornography to guarantee an audience. (These scenes barely fit thematically with the rest of the film, and not at all photographically; closeups of Lindberg match with her hardcore stand-in in ways that violate the laws of physics.) In other areas, the reach for realism takes on an unhealthy pallor. Lindberg says she shot up with saline solution to mimic her character’s heroin habit and was given live ammo for the gunplay scenes. And then there’s the moment when Tony goes all Un Chien Andalou on Frigga’s eye, which allegedly involves an actual corpse (in some reports, the body of a young woman who committed suicide). The filmmakers evidently didn’t trust their tale to be dour enough without indulging in some of the misery themselves.

Thriller – A Cruel Picture has many cheerleaders who respect the purity of its grindhouse aesthetic; for example, Quentin Tarantino tips his cap with Daryl Hannah’s Kill Bill eyepatch. But notably, neither Tarantino nor anyone else apes the style of Thriller, and that’s because it’s ultimately too slow and too flat to engage. Frigga’s revenge should be born out of a lifetime of accumulated rage, but while Lindberg’s cold dissociation can be justified, the disinterest of the movie itself is baffling. Once Frigga starts killing, the murders are drawn-out affairs, filmed in extreme slow-motion to enhance every spurt of blood. The gun blasts that take out Frigga’s abusers are no more or less impactful than the punches and kicks that incapacitate policemen called to the scene. Even the wild driving that causes every car on the road to explode on contact like the Pinto in Top Secret! has no ripple effect, no influence on the characters or the world around them. 

I want to be clear that I’m not resentful of Thriller for not giving me the crowd-pleasing, feel-good revenge that I crave. This is a dark picture about dark doings, and emphasizing that none of this is enjoyable is a perfectly valid point of view. What bothers me is that this is not a movie that cares to take any point of view. The events of Frigga’s physical and mental torture are rendered no differently than her subsequent retribution. Nothing builds upon anything else; the violence and cruelty are just items on a checklist. By the time Frigga reaches her final goal, exacting revenge upon the cretin who captured her, the means of his demise is suitably ghoulish, but bears no resonance. There’s neither the satisfaction of having vanquished her foe nor the letdown from failing to achieve that satisfaction. It’s just disconnected violence, devoid of art. Thriller – A Cruel Picture is indeed a cruel picture, but a thriller it is not.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Writer-producer-director Bo Arne Vibenius strikes a peculiar balance throughout Thriller, because even though he fills the screen with grotesque images of murder, mutilation, and rape, Vibenius employs stately pacing and stylish slow-motion effects to create a beguiling style. Combined with twitchy flourishes on the soundtrack, including dissonant electric noises and surreal audio filters, the aesthetic of Thriller vaguely resembles that of Werner Herzog’s films… It’s all quite horrible and ugly, and yet strangely lyrical, too.” – Peter Hanson, Every 70s Movie

(This movie was nominated for review by Zyll666. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Where to watch Thriller: A Cruel Picture