FILM FRENZY

Elisa Thiemann  and Suzan Anbeh in Effigy: Poison and the City (Photos: GeekFrog Media)

By Matt Brunson

EFFIGY: POISON AND THE CITY
★★★ (out of four)
DIRECTED BY Udo Flohr
STARS Suzan Anbeh, Elisa Thiemann

Most Americans can name at least one or two male serial killers — Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jack the Ripper, etc. — but female serial killers? There’s Aileen Wuornos, and she’s arguably only known because Charlize Theron won an Oscar playing her in 2003’s Monster. Yet many have existed, and one such mass murderer would be Gesche Gottfried, the subject of the German import Effigy: Poison and the City.

Directed by Udo Flohr and written by Flohr, Antonia Roeller, and Peer Meter (based on his own stage play), Effigy has had a long and winding road up to the present. As far as I can tell, it appeared at film festivals in 2019, hit our shores in 2020, debuted in its homeland in 2022, began popping up on streaming services at some point in the last couple of years, and was released stateside on DVD this past February. But here’s where it gets problematic. The version I was provided by the distributor to screen for this review was in the original German and accompanied by English subtitles. But the version offered on the various streaming services (among them Amazon Prime, Hoopla, and The Roku Channel) is dubbed into English — I tried to watch this version out of curiosity, and the dubbing is dreadful, filled to the brim with performers all striving to be as monotonous and stilted as possible. I checked online to ascertain the language employed for the DVD and found reviews from customers lambasting it for also being the dubbed version. So this review is for the original German-language release, and if anyone can inform me where this version is readily available on this side of the Atlantic, I (and doubtless others) would be interested to know. Hopefully, it’s out there, because this one is well worth seeing.

Set in the town of Bremen in 1828, it follows the story through the eyes of Cato Böhmer (Elisa Thiemann), a law clerk newly arrived in town to assist Senator Droste (Christoph Gottschalch) with his court cases. A woman in such a position was unheard of during this period in German history, meaning Böhmer has to contend with incredulity and condescension while tackling her job. But she quickly proves her worth to Droste, particularly as it pertains to the mystery of who is sprinkling arsenic on the food at the home of Mr. Rumpff (Peer Roggendorf).

Among the suspects is Gesche Gottfried (Suzan Anbeh), who used to own the house but sold it to Rumpff and his late wife and now works there as a servant. While Gottfried is known as the “Angel of Bremen” for her charitable work around town, she’s also been seemingly plagued by awful luck all her life. Among the friends and family members who died over the years were two husbands, three children, her parents, her twin brother, her BFF, and Rumpff’s wife. Nobody ever bothered to spot the neon-light connection between all these deaths — the dippy doctor (Eugen Daniel Krössner) chalked most of the fatalities up to the cholera epidemic that had seized Germany for a couple of years. That changes when Rumpff brings his suspicions to Droste, who, ably aided by Böhmer, realizes that Gottfried is likely behind the murders.

In real life, the clerk played by Thiemann was a man, but the filmmakers opted to perform a sex change for their story. This may not make the movie a case study in historical accuracy, but it does add an interesting dynamic to the picture, as Böhmer becomes the only person never to be deceived by the beautiful, sexy, and flirtatious Gottfried. Thiemann plays her character as a no-nonsense sort, which contrasts nicely with the manipulative Gottfried. And Anbeh is excellent as the murderess, who almost seems to be role-playing her entire existence. She can sound alternately remorseful and pitiless, and it’s only after Böhmer tells her that “you can stop acting” that she chillingly declares, “Others shrink back from evil. I can be evil with pleasure.” Since the reason for the real Gesche Gottfried’s decades-long killing spree has never been definitively established, with scientists and scholars continuing to offer theories, the movie smartly never settles the question of why with anything more concrete than because.