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 Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THRILLER – A CRUEL PICTURE (1973)
