Summary
In the gas-lit labyrinth of Wilhelmine Berlin, a single surname—Dombronowska—detonates like a chandelier crashing onto parquet. The film, a 1919 phantasmagoria unearthed from the ashes of a shuttered studio, charts the implosion of an aristocratic clan whose bloodline is rumored to carry the rot of every sin Europe ever whispered. Countess Aurelia Dombronowska, a sable-draped revenant with the eyes of a startled doe, returns from a Parisian exile clutching a sealed letter said to contain the precise hour of her family’s extinction. Her brother, the syphilitic composer Casimir, staggers through torch-lit corridors composing a funeral march whose final chord is timed to coincide with the collapse of the family vault. Their mother, a marble-skinned matriarch who sleeps in an ebony cradle lined with suicide notes, breeds white moths in her hair to remind God that innocence is biodegradable. Into this mausoleum strides Erich von Ryssel, a former cavalry officer turned forensic accountant, hired to trace the vanished fortune but fatally distracted by Aurelia’s scent of lilac and cyanide. Between absinthe luncheons and séances conducted in abandoned railway stations, the narrative fractures into prismatic flashbacks: a child’s glove floating in a thawing pond; a monocle that reflects the future; a waltz whose tempo accelerates each time it is played until dancers hemorrhage from the ears. When the letter is finally pried open, the ink has dried into a map of the Berlin sewers where the clan’s bastard heirs—now pickpockets and anarchists—plot to storm the palace wearing the embalmed skins of their forebears. The last reel combusts inside a ballroom draped in asbestos curtains; the orchestra, a hydra of burning violins, keeps playing as the chandeliers plunge like comets, and Aurelia’s laughter ricochets off the walls until it becomes the film’s sole surviving soundtrack.
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