James Oliver’s booklet-notes for Laurin make the valid point that Gothic tends to be played out in modern cinema as pastiche. That being unsympathetic to the romantic trappings of the Gothic, audiences have long turned away from the old Hammer film approach (Terence Fisher’s Dracula outings) and embraced something more knowing and self-conscious (viz-Mark Gattis’s BBC TV version of Dracula).
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I agree with Oliver that what’s been lost today is the reflective literary sensibility of the Gothic. Gothic is not so much a style as a state of consciousness. It’s surprising to discover Laurin, made in 1988, remaining true to the Gothic spirit. Laurin has a purity of conception that proves to be subtly apt for the overriding theme of Gothic art - the fearful presence of death.
The location is Bavaria at the beginning of the 20th century. In a peaceful town lives the very pretty nine-year old Laurin (sensitively played by Dora Szinelor). She dotes on her father, a seaman who is always leaving for long sea voyages. After his latest departure Laurin’s mother is killed on a bridge whilst encountering a stranger, looking like a bogeyman, carrying a body in a sack. Laurin is haunted by the living presence (not ghost) of her mother; visions of a distraught child banging on the window; a ruined castle and a man in black with his large black dog. She finds comfort in a book of folk legends as schoolchildren keep disappearing.
In its nuanced emphasis on mood and character Laurin can be read as a psycho-sexual melodrama: a Freudian-driven case study. Laurin witnesses the naked, soapsud back of her father standing up in the bath, though she looks more puzzled than shocked. And father is caught by grandmother as he fondles the breasts of his wife. After the mother’s death Laurin shows no sign of trauma but is more concerned to be with her father, even mistaking a man on a boat to be him. When father does return from his sea trip he can’t handle the situation and returns to sea. A new schoolmaster arrives in the town who for Laurin becomes another father figure.
Laurin, in a moment of play with a friend, dresses up to look like a man. When Laurin does avenge the death of the mother she appears almost spectral, wearing her mother’s cloak, and accidentally causes the killer’s death. We are meant to feel there’s a psychological transference here as the serial murderer bears a strong resemblance to her father. Yet to discuss Laurin solely in Freudian terms would be far too reductive and obvious. For the film tactfully avoids any overt Freudian symbolism – images of a broken toy doll, black kite and Laurin’s dead kitten do fit naturally into the girl’s point of view without feel awkwardly placed for effect.
A great deal of Laurin is disquietingly suggestive and sketched in. Its quiet understated power makes for a compelling drama. Sigl’s film is penetratingly atmospheric and contains some of the most beautiful imagery outside of the work of Mario Bava at his peak whilst referencing the colour-filter photography used by Dario Argento. Sigl knows his horror cinema. The film has echoes of not just Bava and Argento but The Innocents, Night of the Hunter, Spirit of the Beehive, the silent Nosferatu and other Dracula movies. Though Laurin is not really a horror film (we experience numerous unnerving surprises rather than visceral shocks): more a dark, brooding and mysterious account of a young girl’s coming of age in a time of authoritarian education and repressive religious belief.
Occasionally there’s tension between art house movie and a period horror that slightly mars its power and intention. Yet Laurin is impressive: ambiguous, uneasy, rigorous and charged with poetic visuals (photography is by Nyika Jansco, son of the famous director Miklos Jansco) evoking the world of F.W. Murnau and the paintings of Casper David Friedrich.
With all these synthesised influences and inspirations abounding Laurin manages to be an original and highly personal achievement. It is a film for the serious student of the Gothic and connoisseurs of horror cinema, containing layered, would-be transcendent yearnings.
- Alan Price
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