Review of Master of the House (1925) by Andrey B — 12 Oct 2018

A boring and sad picture, I can't believe this was made by the same director who in several years would make 'Vampyr'. Such phrases like 'all *insert any group here* are alike' or 'all *insert any group here* are foolish' deserve condemnation alone.

How such a director could make such a simple-minded, edging with stupidity, film, I don't know. It's not comedy at all, it's a story about hateful, evil, disgusting people. The first one being a vainglorious, for whatever reason, man named Viktor, who abuses his wife and children; we are told that it's how it's like in a typical household, which is outright lie in itself - the truth is he takes the extreme and exploits it for some agenda, making it as an 'example'; the same way he could have taken an abusive wife and shown a 'typical' woman of the household, which would have been absurd just the same.

Then we are presented with the other tyrant, who is probably more evil and hideous, an old woman named Mads, who is as resentful and hateful, but does it in more secretive and repulsive manner; under the countenance of a concerned person there hides a monster, bragging about how she used to spank him in the childhood; probably if she did less spanking and shared more love, Viktor wouldn't have been such an awful person, it's all about nurture too, isn't it? All in all, we have a movie which doesn't raise questions, or in the end we don't feel changed or our worldview shattered, it teaches us to answer to hate with hate, I wonder what happened to Christian values of compassion? I give this film two stars only for technical reasons, but even technically the film is much weaker than its contemporary pictures of Germany or Sweden, for example.

As for the content, this film is awful.