4K Restoration
Wheelchair accessible, English subtitles, Pay-what-you-can tickets (£2-£8)
If you want to attend this screening but find it unaffordable, you may be able to have the cost of your ticket, commute, and/or childcare covered by the Audience Access Fund — see here for further details.
A landmark work of Czechoslovak New Wave, Juraj Herz’s hauntingly surreal adaptation of Ladislav Fuks’s novel is a darkly comic horror masterpiece, as scathing as it is groundbreaking.
Set in 1930s Prague, the film follows Karel Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrušínský), a seemingly mild-mannered crematorium worker who becomes increasingly obsessed with the notion of death as a means of purification. As Nazi ideology begins to infiltrate his worldview, Kopfrkingl's twisted sense of morality spirals into madness, leading him to see his work as a divine mission to ‘save’ humanity by sending souls to the afterlife.
A chilling exploration of how ordinary people can be seduced to commit unspeakable evil, The Cremator’s unique visual style — marked by disorienting close-ups — externalises the interior degradation of a man, and by extension a society, corrupted by a poisonous ideology.
Content notes: murder, death, the Holocaust, antisemitism
Curated by Joe McFarlane
Trailer
