For the screen adaptation of his macabre tale of the same name, novelist Ladislav Fuks could hardly have found a more inventive director than Juraj Herz. In order to create a vivid portrait of an extremely dangerous individual, Herz blended elements of horror, thriller, psychological study, drama, and dark comedy with the same degree of sophistication as did the author himself. The hero, ostensibly the ideal representative of all civic virtues, is nothing more than an empty vessel that could be filled with absolutely anything. For this loyal crematorium employee and spurious champion of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the atmosphere of the late 1930s, with its increasingly menacing anti-Semitic charge, becomes a powerful impulse towards the realisation of his perverse visions.

World premiere of the digitally restored version.