I must have seen a different movie than most reviewers. It is a quiet little film, with too much piled on at the ending, so the pacing is a little off. My copy has atrocious sound, the conversations are almost impossible to understand.
Yes, it begins with a documentary filmmaker working on a film about body preservation, taxidermy, mummification, cryopreservation etc. An ace taxidermist (Sam) is traced by the film's maker and interviewed. Sam lives with Iris as recluses in the woods, where the couple enact a strange play with taxidermied animals and marionettes. The woman plays the score on cello. When the play is finished, so is her life. Into this strange setting the documentary filmmaker stumbles...
Spoilers:
Clearly there were no Nazis hiding in the woods. The woman cellist has a concentration camp number tattooed on her arm. That pretty much excludes her from having been a Nazi. The man recounts that he was a marionette maker who was conscripted by Nazis to make prosthetics. He then made an artificial foot/leg for a Jewish boy (brought to him for unknown reasons by a SS officer). Somehow he escaped with the boy and the woman to the US. There the boy was taunted by neighbors and pushed off a cliff into a pond. The boy pulled one of his attackers over the edge with him, and both boys drowned. The other boy was imprisoned, to return decades later as the redneck living in the RV near the couple's home.
The townspeople are sympathetic to the couple, which they wouldn't be if they were simply Nazi hideouts or weirdos.
I wish the central story of the couple's life and loss, their pact etc., would have been the focus of the film, not the filmmaker or his inane piece on taxidermy.
Yes, it begins with a documentary filmmaker working on a film about body preservation, taxidermy, mummification, cryopreservation etc. An ace taxidermist (Sam) is traced by the film's maker and interviewed. Sam lives with Iris as recluses in the woods, where the couple enact a strange play with taxidermied animals and marionettes. The woman plays the score on cello. When the play is finished, so is her life. Into this strange setting the documentary filmmaker stumbles...
Spoilers:
Clearly there were no Nazis hiding in the woods. The woman cellist has a concentration camp number tattooed on her arm. That pretty much excludes her from having been a Nazi. The man recounts that he was a marionette maker who was conscripted by Nazis to make prosthetics. He then made an artificial foot/leg for a Jewish boy (brought to him for unknown reasons by a SS officer). Somehow he escaped with the boy and the woman to the US. There the boy was taunted by neighbors and pushed off a cliff into a pond. The boy pulled one of his attackers over the edge with him, and both boys drowned. The other boy was imprisoned, to return decades later as the redneck living in the RV near the couple's home.
The townspeople are sympathetic to the couple, which they wouldn't be if they were simply Nazi hideouts or weirdos.
I wish the central story of the couple's life and loss, their pact etc., would have been the focus of the film, not the filmmaker or his inane piece on taxidermy.