Danish Shocker

A Stranger Knocks. A woman opens the door. It is raining and she asks him in. He says he wants to rent a cottage like hers, a solitary house by the sea. She offers him supper and a bed for the night. He accepts with apparent gratitude, but when she closes her bedroom door he goes gliding silently from room to room like a weasel on the lurk. The next morning, with many thanks for her hospitality, he leaves to catch a bus, but several hours later he is back. "Missed it," he says with an ingenuous smile. He stays another night, and on the third day, when they go swimming, he makes love to her in a meadow beside the sea.

All that day the lovers (Birgitte Federspiel and Preben Lerdorff Rye) dart about the house and through the fields like a pair of amorous butterflies. But the next day, when she takes off for town to buy some groceries, he stops her by main force. And a little while later, when the postman rings, he hides in the bedroom till the fellow goes away. "To avoid gossip," he explains a little too anxiously, and she accepts his explanation. But about the same time she discovers that her loaded gun is missing, and that night she sees on his arm a peculiar scar that could belong only to one man: the quisling, now a fugitive, who supervised the torture and murder of her husband during the German occupation.

Up to this point the film comports itself like an artful if sometimes arty thriller, one of the best films made in Denmark in recent years. But at this point it abruptly becomes the sex shocker of the cinema season. In a scene that is bizarre, to say the least, the heroine discovers the criminal identity of her lover at the erotic climax of their affair. Her scream is a scream of horror--but also a scream of ecstasy.

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