1974, Sweden
Original title: Thriller – en grym film
Alternative title: Thriller – A Cruel Picture
Perhaps the most celebrated of Swedish softcore goddess Christina Lindberg’s salacious exploitation roles, They Call Her One Eye stars Lindberg as Madeleine, a naive farm girl who has been mute since being sexually assaulted by an old man in the woods as a child.
One day on the road she is offered a ride by a sleazebag named Tony who kidnaps her and forces her into a life of prostitution at his brothel, addicting her to heroin in the process.
When she refuses to service one of the clients, he has her eye gouged out and this eye-patched beauty becomes an exotic favourite of the brothel’s gross clientele (as well as becoming one of the most iconic images of the rape-revenge canon), who see her ‘disability’ as a turn-on.
But the greatest affront in her eye(s) is that Tony has sent a fake letter to her beloved parents, expressing seething hatred toward them that allegedly prompted her to run away from home.
When her parents get the letter, they are distraught and commit suicide.
Finding out about their death, Madeleine solidifies her plan for revenge.
After praying for forgiveness in church (as Max von Sydow did in The Virgin Spring, and which prefigures similar sequences in Ms.45 and Possession) she goes through the rape-revenge film’s standard self-improvement trajectory – learning how to drive, how to shoot, and practicing martial arts – before donning her famous black trench coat and shotgun and dispatching Tony’s accomplices, while subjecting him to a particularly nasty fate.
The film was controversial for its mixing of real and fantasy footage: the sex/violation scenes in most prints include hardcore inserts – predating Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh
This equally controversial Baise-moi – the ammunition was live, and the ‘special effect’ used to create the eye-gouging scene involved a real cadaver.
It was also criticized for its aesthetic inconsistency (despite many ugly, clunky sequences, Vibenius worked with Ingmar Bergman on both Hour of the Wolf and Persona and the master’s influence can be felt in moments of austere beauty), but Lindberg’s anguished performance is what makes the film of lasting interest.
She is believable, tragic, and shoots with the silent rage of generations.
They Call Her One Eye (1974)
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