Es werde Licht! 3. Teil

Summary

Austere acres of inherited forest become a charnel chapel when syphilitic rot seeps from the landlord’s loins into the family bloodline; the squire—already half-devoured by mercury-scented nightmares—turns his manor into a panopticon of cruelty, flogging his trembling wife with silence and devouring the forester’s tremulous daughter with predatory gazes. The girl, cornered between parish morality and the gnawing fear of a bastard swelling, drifts toward the river like Ophelia re-shot in stark German chiaroscuro; her plunge is interrupted only by the crack of a shepherd’s distant rifle, a sonic scar that ricochets through the remaining reels. Meanwhile the patriarch, bulbous pustules blooming like crimson medals across his once-aristocratic jaw, dances a death-waltz in a candle-lit hallway, each step a mockery of the waltzes he once led before spirochetes commandeered his nerves. In the fallout, the heir—gaunt, wide-eyed, half-mad with the notion that the same phantasmal poison swims in his own plasma—descends into a labyrinth of mirrors, razors and quack apothecaries, until the film’s final image freezes on his ashen face superimposed over the father’s decomposing grin: an ontological ouroboros in which the sins of the sire literally eclipse the son’s last breath.

Synopsis

In the third part syphilis is also at the center of the action. This time a landowner falls ill. He proves to be a real fiend, tyrannizes his wife and seduces the daughter of the forester he employs. When the young woman thinks she can't find a way out, she seeks suicide. Finally, the despot also dies and, post mortem, takes his son with him into the misfortune. The latter believes that he too is suffering from syphilis and is soon obsessed with this delusion.