Summary
A baronial dusk settles over the crumbling manor where John Blixen, cadaverous patriarch of a once-lush estate, counts his remaining heartbeats like coins slipping through cracked fingers. His breath rattles through vaulted corridors; each exhalation loosens another stone from the family crest. Yet mortality’s chill pales beside the dread that his feckless heir Ralph—an untempered blade of entitlement—will inherit not only soil and serfs but the vertiginous freedom to squander both. In the candle-bruised twilight, father and son circle one another: one decaying into parchment skin, the other swelling with unearned importance. Their private duel of recrimination is watched by a chorus of housemaids, creditors, and distant cousins who smell blood in the gravy. Emilie Sannom’s wide-eyed housekeeper drifts through scenes like a conscience in a lace collar, while Peter S. Andersen’s Ralph oscillates between Byronesque tantrums and sudden, almost canine neediness. The camera—static yet merciless—records each microscopic betrayal: a forged signature, a cracked heirloom teacup, a whispered promise to a servant girl whose belly swells with another branch of the Blixen lineage. When the landowner finally exhales his last, the estate’s iron gates slam shut of their own ponderous weight, trapping Ralph inside a kingdom of dust. What remains is not redemption but a long, echoing question: can a man inherit the earth without inheriting the guilt that fertilizes it?
Landowner John Blixton is dying. Taking leave of life worries him less than what will happen to his son Ralph, who is left alone in the world to control the property and his own life.
