Landru, der Blaubart von Paris

In the shadow of the Great War’s lingering trauma, 'Landru, der Blaubart von Paris' unfolds as a chilling autopsy of the predatory psyche. Henri-Désiré Landru, portrayed with a sinister, bureaucratic precision, navigates the desolate landscape of post-war France not as a soldier, but as a scavenger of souls. The narrative meticulously deconstructs his methodology: the curated advertisements in Parisian dailies, the calculated seduction of widows whose grief rendered them vulnerable, and the eventual, horrific domesticity of his Gambais villa. The film eschews mere sensationalism to explore the banality of his evil, focusing on the mechanical nature of his disappearances. Each victim represents a ledger entry in a ledger of death, where the warmth of a bourgeois parlor is juxtaposed against the black, acrid smoke of a kitchen stove that serves as a makeshift crematorium. It is a study of a man who treated homicide as a cottage industry, turning the sacred institution of courtship into a conveyor belt for the macabre.