Summary
A sun-bleached Danish manor, half-drowned in lilies and ancestral guilt, becomes the stage for a fever-dream of mourning. After the patriarch’s coffin is lowered into the clay, his widow—played by Rita Sacchetto with the brittle hauteur of a deposed empress—locks every clock in the house, convinced that time itself murdered her husband. Her three daughters, each a separate octave of ache, drift through corridors wallpapered with suicide notes. The eldest, a spectral Mathilde Felumb Friis, rehearses her own funeral in the mirror; the middle girl, Grete Reinwald, seduces the shadow of the late father, projecting his home-movies onto a sheet soaked in chloroform; the youngest, Hanni Reinwald, believes the manor’s dumb-waiter is a confession booth and whispers her sins to the pulleys. Into this mausoleum staggers Alf Blütecher’s itinerant phrenologist, clutching a velvet case of skull-measuring calipers and a secret dose of strychnine, offering the mother a bargain: erase grief by trepanning memory itself. While he drills shallow hopes into the household, Anton de Verdier’s blind archivist listens to the walls, transcribing the heartbeat of the house onto rice-paper that he then eats, page by page, to keep the truth from escaping. Frederik Jacobsen appears as a telegram boy who delivers only obituaries written in advance; Henny Lauritzen’s housekeeper burns every photograph except the eyes, which she stitches into a quilt that will later smother the vicar. Johanne Krum-Hunderup’s nun arrives by night, carrying a reliquary said to contain Christ’s last tear, but by dawn she is discovered inside the grandfather clock, having traded her habit for the father’s moth-eaten tailcoat. The film climaxes when the manor is flooded by a tide of benzene-laced tears; the daughters, now wearing their father’s death-masks, perform a danse macabre on the dining-table while the phonograph loops a lullaby sung backwards. In the final shot, the camera ascends through the skylight to reveal the entire estate folded like a paper boat, drifting across a moonlit sea of forgotten sorrows—leaving only the echo of a drill bit still gnawing at bone.
