Synopsis
Dark fairytale about a demonic doctor who abducts a beautiful opera singer with designs on transforming her into a mechanical nightingale.
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Cast
- Amira CasarMalvina van Stille
- Gottfried JohnDr. Emmanuel Droz
- Assumpta SernaAssumpta
- César SaratxuAdolfo Blin / Don Felisberto Fernandez
- Ljubisa GruicicHolz (gardener)
- Marc BischoffMarc (gardener)
- Henning PekerHenning (gardener)
- Gilles GavoisEcheverria (gardener)
- Thomas SchmiederThomas (gardener)
- Regine ZimmermannDresser
Recommendations
- 80
The Hollywood Reporter
The film is about vanity and pride, and the caging of beauty. Its elaborate fabrication has an intoxicating quality that captures the imagination like all good horror stories. - 80
The New York Times
Flaunting elements of "Phantom of the Opera" and "The Island of Lost Souls," the movie, with its haunting, claustrophobic environment, allows the living and the merely lifelike to interact with an eerie beauty. - 75
New York Post
Mainstream audiences will be put off by the lack of a straightforward narrative, but adventurous moviegoers will find pleasure in the hypnotic originality of the images. - 75
TV Guide Magazine
Seething with suggestions of perverse pleasures and inchoate horror, this dark fairy tale won't win the Pennsylvania-born, London-based Quay brothers any new fans -- it plays to the converted, and the converted know who they are. - 70
Variety
Impresses as a visually exquisite, rigorously intellectual but dauntingly obscurantist fable about automatons, opera singers and herniated desire that will appeal exclusively to arthouse auds with rarefied tastes. - 70
Village Voice
The story--is only important in that it gives the Quays a foundation for their fabulous animated tableaux. - 50
The A.V. Club
Perhaps the film will connect with those attuned to the Quays' allusive wavelength, much as a dog responds to a whistle. Others won't hear a thing. - 50
New York Daily News
With the film's hypnotic emphasis on artistry and architecture, most viewers will probably get their satisfaction from the striking visual elements, particularly the stop-motion animation.
