Wilczyca – review

Director: Marek Piestrak

Release date: 1983

Contains (lots of) spoilers

I vacillated with this film as to whether to review it or suggest it was a film that used some tropes from the vampire genre. I came across it in the volume Strange Blood: 71 Essays on Offbeat and Underrated Vampire Movies. The film’s title translates to She-Wolf and my first instinct, watching the film before reading the essay by Wojciech Wolski, was that it was not a vampire film despite using some familiar tropes. Nor was it your traditional werewolf film and probably had as much to do with witchcraft as anything else.

graveyard

However, Wolski argues that it is more in line with the Slavic vampire – though again that was more tropes employed than the overall creature’s features – and I was struck by a quote in the essay, from director Marek Piestrak that said “here vampirism is connected to National treason”, indicating that the director read vampirism into the film… maybe… the issue with the quote (indeed with all the essays in the volume, which are less academic and more love notes) is that there us no citation for the quote and a google could not track it down. Benefit of the doubt will prevail, however, and I will review the film. I will also mercilessly spoil it as I look at the tropes employed and those moments of obfuscation that may be lore that has not been thought through or, indeed, left deliberately vague.

Kacper arrives home

The film was due to be set just before the January Uprising (1863) but (uncited) Piestrak was forced by the then still Communist administration to move the timeline to the Greater Poland Uprising of 1848 and change the Russian soldiers in the film to Austrian Hussars. Nevertheless it is still a film about patriotism and treason and the patriotism is personified by primary character Kacper Wosinski (Krzysztof Jasinski), who returns from a prolonged trip to discover from his brother, Mateusz (Jerzy Prazmowski), that his wife, Maryna (Iwona Bielska), is gravely ill having self-aborted her child. He immediately asks who the father was due to the length of time he has been away.

Maryna dying

The doctor, at first, prevents them going to her. Outside he says that it is only a matter of time as her insides have been ripped up. Once he is by her deathbed it is clear that she hates him, but there is apparently no love lost either way, as she says that he called her a bitch and she’ll die like one. His offer of a priest is scorned and when he sees the crucifix has gone from the wall, she tells him that she burned it at Candlemas, instead she clings to something wrapped and clutched to her chest. As she dies her final words are, “I’ll find you”. Unwrapping the thing she clutched to, they find a wolf’s paw.

staking

Kacper and Mateusz struggle along a mud track with a horse pulling her coffin when Mateusz stops suddenly and cuts a tree to quickly carve a stake. Kacper is horrified but Mateusz simply says she was a witch. They continue to the cemetery but, once the grave is dug, no one has come – including the priest. He will not come says Mateusz – whilst Kacper has been away Maryna has indulged in drunkenness and debauchery, all seen by their neighbours, and dabbled in black magic. The priest refused to come. He opens the coffin and tries to get Kacper to stake her, given he was her husband, but he refuses. Mateusz hopes Kacper won’t regret it and does the deed himself. Stakes, of course, are used traditionally to pin a corpse into the grave and this is a vampire trope (though not unheard of in werewolf films) and witches (and werewolves) become vampires on death in some traditions.

the wolf

So Kacper moves away to become steward for Count Ludwick (Stanislaw Brejdygant). He is undertaking his duties one day when one of his dogs starts crying. He goes to a window and sees a wolf – to address the wolf, the film uses a wolf that appears to be of normal size but is referred to in dialogue as being as big as a calf. He exclaims “she has found me” and grabs his rifle, but the wolf has vanished. He is summoned to the Count as the Count’s loyalist conspirator Count Wiktor Smorawinski (Leon Niemczyk) has arrived. Smorawinski tells Ludwick that the hussars are coming and they have to go into exile and then collapses.

Iwona Bielska as Julia

Ludwig uses a secret door to go to his wife, Julia. Julia is also played by Iwona Bielska but Kacper doesn’t notice the similarities until later. She is with her companion Hortensja Vitie (Hanna Stankówna) and there seems to be a sapphic overtone to their relationship (which is not explicitly explored). Whilst Ludwig’s behaviour indicates that he dotes on his wife, her behaviour seems nasty and spiteful towards him. She questions his virility, openly hints at a physical relationship with Hortensja and uses fake crying to manipulate and hurt him.

the return of Maryna

The way the two Counts flee is unimportant from a genre point of view but during the journey to get them to safety Kacper dreams of Maryna and then seems to see her in the woods. In his dream she has blackened (though perhaps they were meant to seem sharp) teeth and blood on her hands, and when he seems to physically see her the coachman sees something also. Interestingly, though not explored further, they are at a crossroads. Nevertheless, the Counts escape and Kacper is left in charge of the estate and told to look after Julia. 

tasting his blood

Just after they have fled a band of hussars arrive and their commander Otto (Olgierd Lukaszewicz) had, we see in flashback, a carnal relationship with Julia prior to her marriage (or so it would appear). In that flashback, interestingly, we see Julia feeding wolves captured on her father’s estate and, as part of their physicality, licking blood from Otto’s hand after a wolf catches it when he feeds it. It is the only instance of blood drinking seen in the film and is sexual more than anything.

rotten Maryna

So, the wolf is stalking the environs, and Kacper, who has a bout of swamp fever, sees Maryna and the wolf on separate occasions. Mateusz shows up with Kacper’s rent monies and the lease to the house. He will no longer stay in the house – he heard the dogs whimpering and saw Maryna, her face rotten and blood at her chest where the stake had been. There was a battle near the house, he reports, and the cemetery was hit with ballistics, unearthing graves and, when he checked, Maryna’s grave was empty – Mateusz extrapolates that the stake was removed by the blast. He gives his brother a daguerreotype of Maryna and Kacper suddenly recognises her as Julia. We’ll return to this as clearly Maryna and Julia lived contemporaneously.

Henryk Machalica as Goldberg

So, edited lore highlights. We have Kacper stalking the wolf and trying to shoot it. Eventually he manages to wing it and follows the blood, but the blood trail leads to Julia who is out riding. She is later seen with her hand bandaged (though it is only a scratch and she doesn’t remember how she got it, she insists). That, of course, fits neatly into werewolf tales. Kacper consults the local doctor, Goldberg (Henryk Machalica), about whether the spirit of a dead person can posses a living one and, through a bible passage, he confirms it.

the picture bleeds

Later the doctor uses magic (invoking angels and devils it seems and commanding the spirit, strangely, to “turn to stone and drink my blood”) and stabs the daguerreotype – this causes it to bleed and Julia, back at the house, is crippled with pain. The doctor then has Kacper burn the daguerreotype – for me this scene confirms the connection between Julia and Maryna, though if it were meant to help combat her then the film remains silent on its long-term impact. Interestingly, though Julia is accused of having changed (due, one assumes to the possession by Maryna), she was actually pretty much the same – if the flashback to her meeting Otto is to be believed. One might read the flashback as a bewitchment of the officer, however, rather than an actual event from the past.

wolf remains

In the director’s quote above, treason was equated to vampirism. The film hammers her treason home by having her throw a ball that no one attends, Kacper suggests this is because there are decent poles left (and the hussars are at the house with whom Julia is consorting). The doctor casts a silver bullet in holy water (best cast on the New Moon, suggests a local earlier in the film) and scratches a cross into it. Kacper then shoots Julia (naked in bed with Otto) through the eye, killing her (noting that this seems to be about killing the possessing spirit). Interestingly, when at the very end of the film the Count returns and she is disinterred from her unhallowed grave to be buried in a churchyard, the coffin is opened and the skeleton of a wolf is found.

Krzysztof Jasinski as Kacper

So, a long old look at the lore and you can see why classing this as vampire was difficult. There are certainly swathes of werewolf lore and, of course, bits of that lore crosses over with vampire lore (silver bullets – though casting it in holy water and scratching the cross into it feels more vampire than werewolf). There is also possession, of course, and witchcraft aspects mentioned. Maryna seems to want to torment rather than be feeding a hunger. But what about the film itself? Despite the lore being all over the place I really rather liked it. I loved the photography, which added a richly gothic atmosphere to the film. Krzysztof Jasinski was great as Kacper, though the character’s general likability and patriotism was undermined by the confession that he was a domestic abuser of Maryna, and Iwona Bielska was deliciously cruel in both her roles. There was a hint of (or, perhaps, comment on) anti-Semitic sentiment, with the hussars hanging a Jewish innkeeper (off screen) an act that is lamented by the loyalist as a pity because he was “a decent Jew”. The film did get a sequel in 1990, which I haven’t seen but that looks to be more standard Western European/US werewolf. As for this, an atmospheric 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK