The Girl Without a Soul

In a mist-laced hamlet where river fog clings to violin strings, the elder sister, a porcelain virtuoso named Prue, pours her adoration into a cad who cadges her savings while promising symphonies in Vienna that will never echo. Her younger sibling, Lally—barefoot, wind-whipped, eyes the color of thieved sapphires—dances along the dock pilings, bewitching a tongue-tied joiner whose calloused palms tremble at the thought of touching her shadow. Their widowed mother, a lacemaker with lungs full of nettles, stitches bridal finery she will never see worn while the girls’ hearts diverge like split rail tracks: one toward a gilded gutter, the other toward unvarnished devotion. When the rake vanishes with the musician’s pawned harp, Prue’s body follows the instrument’s hollow resonance into the river, a baptism mistaken for suicide; grief calcifies Lally, who, in atonement, dons her sister’s high-button shoes and mute demeanor, courting the carpenter under an assumed virtue while secretly hunting the seducer through dance halls and steamboat casinos. The film’s final reel reveals Prue alive, amnesiac, playing for coins in a snow-globe Austrian village, her bow drawing blood from a borrowed fiddle while Lally, now betrothed to the carpenter, glimpses her through a train window, a double exposure of souls exchanged—one resurrected without memory, the other buried beneath borrowed rectitude—leaving the audience to decide which sister truly lacks a soul.