I, Olga Hepnarová
They say that it takes a village to raise a child; what does that mean when the child grows up to become a mass murderer? Or is blaming society just another aspect of an unquiet mind? Set in the early Seventies, I, Olga Hepnarová is a dramatization of the life of an enigmatic young girl--Olga Hepnarová (Michalina Olszańska)--who would become infamous as the last woman executed in Czechoslovakia following a deadly vehicle-ramming attack which claimed the lives of eight people, and injured twelve more. I, Olga Hepnarová explores the deterioration of Olga's mental state up to and after the attack.
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Dramas about violent killers have a propensity for trying to make sense of what led him or her to become a monster, maintaining a tenuous balance between empathy and disgust. This often leads to a plot-driven thriller with the inevitable climax ripped from the headlines; yet I, Olga Hepnarová opts to explore Olga psychological disintegration through a series of objective episodes. This compels the audience to refrain from casting judgment, weighing her warped state of mind versus her proclaimed nihilism. This chain of events from Olga's life is less like a recipe for how to create a killer than a barrage of moments setting the stage for an inevitable explosion. Olga is chronically depressed, evident from the moment her perpetually stern mother (Klára Melísková) wakes her up for school--she stares off into the distance before getting out of bed and then vomits up fistfuls of pills from a half-hearted suicide attempt. Her classmates beat and kick her in the showers at the dorms--an episide that becomes one more justification for her revenge against the world. Olga reliability is questionable; she claims that her father abused her as a child, and that she in turn abused her sister, even though there is no cinematic evidence of this. She tells a man that she had once been to jail for a year, but her age suggests that this is unlikely. In a nuanced performance by Olszańska, almost everything Olga says and does becomes suspect. She watches girls in her dorm room sneak into bed with one another and begin kissing; another girl offers Olga a cigarette, and Olga claims she doesn't smoke. Yet Olga is almost never seen without a lit cigarette--smoking as though she were racing to make up lost time--and becomes romantically involved with other women. Olga may be repressing her impulses for fear of being ostracized, but it is more likely that she does this to deliberately avoid empathizing with anyone else. She is antagonistic to virtually everyone and is outright rude to her mother, whom it would seem withholds affection out of exasperation, unable to cope with her daughter's obstinacy. The only person Olga opens her heart to is a coworker she awkwardly approaches named Jitka (Marika Soposká), who subsequently asks her out to dinner. Naive to the rules of courtship, Olga pursues Jitka with an obsessiveness that eventually drives her away--adding one more log to the cold fire burning within her that is her mounting hatred for the world.
I, Olga Hepnarová chronicles a series of events that establish Olga as a psychologically unstable young woman. The neutral--almost cinéma vérité styled--eye of the camera identifies inconsistencies in Olga's paranoid claims about her life being rotten beyond her control. Despite a history of seeing psychiatrists, the diagnoses about her mental state have evidently been insufficient, evidenced by her horrible, unwarranted attack. This is difficult for a cinematic profile of a killer--some films gravitate toward sympathizing with the protagonist. Olga is clearly troubled, but she is not depicted as an evil woman. She is incapable of managing her paranoid delusions, justifying her multiple homicides as an act of "liberation" for other downtrodden victims of bullying--the basis of her defense during her trial. Olga is defined by her paradoxical behavior; she claims that she wants to be free of her mother and live in a "hut" in the countryside, yet borrows money from her mom who brings a heater for her so she won't freeze during the winter. She is fired from her job as a driver after endangering public safety, driving on a stone staircase instead of waiting for a truck blocking her in to pull out. Olga claims that she was "blamed at work for nothing", refusing to take ownership for her own recklessness. Olga deliberately behaves in ways designed to defy expectations, like when she hangs her laundry out on a clothesline during a rainstorm. It isn't until Olga starts seeing Jitka that she concludes that she is a lesbian, yet she works almost exclusively with men as a commercial driver; she even dresses and carries herself like a man, actively rebelling against what she believes are others' expectations of her gender.
Olga is almost universally sullen and aloof; at a bonfire outside of her hut, all of the dialogue surrounding her becomes indistinct, as if she has withdrawn into her own private bubble. Events in I, Olga Hepnarová are not presented like a checklist meant to rationalize her vehicle-ramming attack, avoiding explanations like why Olga has cut her hair between scenes (resembling Natalie Portman's character from Leon: The Professional afterwards), or why she dropped out of school to work in a garage. But the unsettling darkness running throughout her is real; when she is sitting on a park bench outside of the hospital with her mother, her awkward stiffness has shades of Norman Bates from Psycho. Her career choice as a driver--along with her social anxiety and fatalistic outlook--also makes her a counterpart to Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver. Consider when she stares at passersby within her van; cigarette smoke fills the cabin like the flames of Hell--her murderous intent is palpable. When the attack comes, it is sudden and swift, virtually without preamble--the letters she mails to the newspapers about her motives notwithstanding. It is presented exclusively from the inside of the van she uses to mow down pedestrians on the sidewalk, adding a chilling level of realism, because the audience is deprived of the buffer of fantasy that comes from a visibly staged set piece. Olga's condemnation of society during her trial is made under supercilious bravado, proclaiming herself as a champion of the downtrodden, reminiscent of a similar speech given near the end of The Countess. (This is ironic since the legacy of the eponymous countess, Erzsébet Báthory, was one of monstrous murder, like Olga.) Despite her facade, the audience knows Olga all too well to believe her claims that killing was an act against the injustices of the world--she is just a scared young woman, unable to cope with the horrors of her own life.
Recommended for: Fans of a chilling depiction of a conflicted woman who is both a troubled girl unprepared to deal with life and a psychotic mass murderer, seething with hatred for everyone. Between Michalina Olszańska's striking performances in I, Olga Hepnarová and The Lure (co-star Marta Mazurek has a small part in this picture), it is evident that she is an actress to watch.
I, Olga Hepnarová chronicles a series of events that establish Olga as a psychologically unstable young woman. The neutral--almost cinéma vérité styled--eye of the camera identifies inconsistencies in Olga's paranoid claims about her life being rotten beyond her control. Despite a history of seeing psychiatrists, the diagnoses about her mental state have evidently been insufficient, evidenced by her horrible, unwarranted attack. This is difficult for a cinematic profile of a killer--some films gravitate toward sympathizing with the protagonist. Olga is clearly troubled, but she is not depicted as an evil woman. She is incapable of managing her paranoid delusions, justifying her multiple homicides as an act of "liberation" for other downtrodden victims of bullying--the basis of her defense during her trial. Olga is defined by her paradoxical behavior; she claims that she wants to be free of her mother and live in a "hut" in the countryside, yet borrows money from her mom who brings a heater for her so she won't freeze during the winter. She is fired from her job as a driver after endangering public safety, driving on a stone staircase instead of waiting for a truck blocking her in to pull out. Olga claims that she was "blamed at work for nothing", refusing to take ownership for her own recklessness. Olga deliberately behaves in ways designed to defy expectations, like when she hangs her laundry out on a clothesline during a rainstorm. It isn't until Olga starts seeing Jitka that she concludes that she is a lesbian, yet she works almost exclusively with men as a commercial driver; she even dresses and carries herself like a man, actively rebelling against what she believes are others' expectations of her gender.
Olga is almost universally sullen and aloof; at a bonfire outside of her hut, all of the dialogue surrounding her becomes indistinct, as if she has withdrawn into her own private bubble. Events in I, Olga Hepnarová are not presented like a checklist meant to rationalize her vehicle-ramming attack, avoiding explanations like why Olga has cut her hair between scenes (resembling Natalie Portman's character from Leon: The Professional afterwards), or why she dropped out of school to work in a garage. But the unsettling darkness running throughout her is real; when she is sitting on a park bench outside of the hospital with her mother, her awkward stiffness has shades of Norman Bates from Psycho. Her career choice as a driver--along with her social anxiety and fatalistic outlook--also makes her a counterpart to Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver. Consider when she stares at passersby within her van; cigarette smoke fills the cabin like the flames of Hell--her murderous intent is palpable. When the attack comes, it is sudden and swift, virtually without preamble--the letters she mails to the newspapers about her motives notwithstanding. It is presented exclusively from the inside of the van she uses to mow down pedestrians on the sidewalk, adding a chilling level of realism, because the audience is deprived of the buffer of fantasy that comes from a visibly staged set piece. Olga's condemnation of society during her trial is made under supercilious bravado, proclaiming herself as a champion of the downtrodden, reminiscent of a similar speech given near the end of The Countess. (This is ironic since the legacy of the eponymous countess, Erzsébet Báthory, was one of monstrous murder, like Olga.) Despite her facade, the audience knows Olga all too well to believe her claims that killing was an act against the injustices of the world--she is just a scared young woman, unable to cope with the horrors of her own life.
Recommended for: Fans of a chilling depiction of a conflicted woman who is both a troubled girl unprepared to deal with life and a psychotic mass murderer, seething with hatred for everyone. Between Michalina Olszańska's striking performances in I, Olga Hepnarová and The Lure (co-star Marta Mazurek has a small part in this picture), it is evident that she is an actress to watch.