Bathory (2008)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) Can we talk about the power of expectations? I watched Bathory on a horror-dedicated channel, and the combination of that plus the well-known subject matter led me to expect a full-on horror film with at least one blood bath. As a consequence, I’m perhaps a bit more upbeat about the result than someone who would have seen the film under different circumstances, properly briefed on what it was trying to do. For Bathory is not quite the schlocky house-of-horror tale of Elizabeth Bathory that I was expecting—It’s much, much closer to a weird well-funded historical drama in which the horror elements of the Bathory legend are used as spice to a story not entirely convinced of her murderous reputation. The result features humour, horror, mystery investigations, lavish historical re-creations and feminist revisionism. It’s significantly more ambitious than I expected, and far more interesting as well—although that scatteredness doesn’t quite bring up Bathory to a should-see status. Some of the visual polish of the film is impressive. (As someone with fondness for big manes of hair, I got an over-the-top satisfaction at seeing Anna Friel in the biggest, widest, wildest wig that hair engineering could create. It’s awesome in its own right.)  Where writer-director Juraj Jakubisko falters, however, is rooted in his own ambitions: the mixture of fantastic dream sequences with harder-edged political revisionism is both familiar and self-contradictory: Of course, the film will argue that Bathory was a woman too good for her times, persecuted for being modern in an intolerant time. (And apparently fond of baths in water tainted red by herbs. Hmm.)  But at the same time Bathory takes such liberties with history in style and content that it’s difficult to take seriously. Friel does quite well and the film exceeds expectations, but the result is not quite the solid film it could have been with more control over the material and its execution.