IN A GLASS CAGE

“A real shocker about Nazism, eroticism, and childhood that is so violently politically incorrect, it has to be seen to be believed. ‘Saló’, move over, your big sister’s in town.”

Equally feared, hated and admired when it premiered in 1986, Agusti Villaronga’s TRAS EL CRISTAL still remains one of the most intelligent, horrifying, and disturbing films of Spanish cinema. The former Nazi doctor Klaus settles in Catalonia after the war and continues his sado-masochist torturing and raping of young boys there. When Angelo, one of his victims, steals incriminating proof and threatens to expose him, Klaus jumps off the roof of the house – and survives. From that moment on, however, he lies in an “iron lung”, the glass cage of the title. Years later, Angelo becomes Klaus’s caretaker. His motive, however, is not conventional revenge, but something far more dire. Villaronga’s razor-sharp, merciless production takes no prisoners and allows the audience no easy way out. Inspired by the atrocities committed by Gilles des Rais, who tortured, raped and murdered children in the early fifteenth century, TRAS EL CRISTAL condenses multiple taboo topics from Nazism and sadism all the way to pedophilia, and assembles them into a Minima Moralia with harrowing consequences. A masterpiece!