A lélekidomár

In a Carpathian manor where candlelight drips like molten amber over baroque tapestries, Countess Irén—half-pagan muse, half-corseted enigma—arrives to civilize the estate’s taciturn heir, Géza, a man more at home among wolves than waltzes. She carries no etiquette manuals, only a violin case rumored to contain her dead mother’s voice; he carries the guilt of a brother drowned in a frozen mill-race, their ancestral ghosts clinging to his coat like frost. Between them unfolds a duel of mesmerism: she teaches the household to waltz on the terrace at midnight, skirts whirling until the marble cracks; he counters by releasing swarms of moths from the attic so the chandeliers dim like eclipsed moons. Servants oscillate between devotion and revolt, believing Irén a white witch when she revives a scullery boy with a single chord on her violin, yet branding her a harpy when she persuades the steward to burn the rent rolls and free the serfs. A traveling cinematograph wagon arrives, projecting flickers of Parisian boulevards on the barn wall; the images mutate, superimposing Irén’s face over Ophelia’s drowning until the villagers stone the screen. Love, here, is not a kiss but a transmutation: Irén trades her shadow to the miller in exchange for Géza’s reflection, condemning herself to wander the halls before dawn as a silhouette without depth. In the final reel the Danube floods the crypt; coffins float open like wardrobes, and the lovers waltz atop them downstream toward the Austro-Hungarian border, their footprints glowing phosphorescent—proof that souls, once broken in, can gallop off-leash.