Spooky at first, then chilling and eventually utterly grim, Juraj Herz’s remarkable The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol in Czech) entirely lives up to its billing as the pre-eminent film of the Czech New Wave.
Here’s where advocates for Closely Observed Trains, The Firemen’s Ball, Daisies and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders pitch in. And on another day one of those might have topped this fictitious list. But I watched The Cremator last night and I can report that after all these decades it remains powerful and seems timeless.
The theme is the corruptibility of the human soul and the subject is a man who is running a crematorium in Czechoslovakia as the Nazis are massing on the borders of the country. Karel Kopfrkingl is an assimilated German, more Czech than the Czech in some respects, who’s married to a Jewish woman. As the Germans get closer, and ethnic Germans around Kopfrkingl start to shift their self-perception away from the Slavic and towards the Teutonic, so does Kopfrkingl, cutting his suit to match the ideological cloth of the invaders and justifying his actions to himself in incessant talk – whether it’s in voiceover or in dramatised scenes featuring Kopfrkingl, his family, his co-workers or the prostitutes he visits, this man’s wheedling, self-important voice never lets up.
This is a remarkable performance by Rudolf Hrušínský, best known at this point for his comedic turn in The Good Soldier Švejk, as the bloviating Kopfrkingl, who talks as if every word were being taken down for posterity, has a suspicious Hitler side parting in his hair and is overly handsy with his own kids. Everything Kopfrkingl does is creepy – cleaning his ears with a cotton bud at the dinner table; combing the hair of the corpses in the crematorium cellar and then giving his own hair a lick with the same comb. Often talking straight into the camera lens, the overly precise and fastidious Kopfrkingl is undeniably camp but in Hrušínský’s portrayal there’s also sustained menace and a barely controlled hysteria. Not that Kopfrkingl sees himself in any of those ways.
The endless self-justification and lack of self-awareness is something that Istvan Szabo would later pick up on in his trio of films about labile individuals – Mephisto, Colonel Redl and Hanussen – and the influence could not be clearer. However, Szabo’s films are objective in nature – they’re a god’s eye view. The Cremator is much more subjectively psychological. Using the distinctive deadness of post-dubbed sound to his advantage, Herz makes the close-miked Kopfrkingl the sonic centre of his movie, while visually he portrays him and his milieu in a dizzying variety of ways. Long, medium and close-up shots done on a switchback of lenses, with moments of rapid editing here and there to further destabilise things. Zdenek Liska’s score, often of wordless chanting, suggests grim outcomes long before they’ve arrived on the screen.
There is black comedy, often from the mismatch between Kopfrkingl’s vision of himself – the god-fearing family man who thinks nothing of bothering a pretty cleaner at work – but in particular in the moments of wild imaginative excess when the deluded Kopfrkingl starts comparing himself to the Dalai Lama. Here – where Herz draws comparisons between the obviously reviled Nazis and a beatific Eastern religion – is where his message becomes clearest. Ideology, no matter where it’s coming from, is ideology. Czech audiences labouring under the yoke of the Soviets understood.
As a portrait of a man who’s got no personal integrity, it’s second to none. As a piece of technical film-making it is also superb. As a ratcheting up of the horrific ante until we get to final scenes that are chilling and yet make complete tonal sense, it’s perfectly done.
It’s a perfect film. And in the Criterion disc I watched it on, the 2019 restoration means it connects like a punch in the guts.
The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
