Movie Reviews : Evil Begets Hideous Evil in ‘Glass Cage’

At least Spanish writer-director Agustin Villaronga, in his 1982 debut feature “In a Glass Cage” (Westside Pavilion), lets you know what you’re in for with his pre-credit sequence. In the cellar of a remote castle-like structure in Spain, a middle-aged man with strongly Teutonic features (Gunter Meisner) has strung up a naked, badly beaten adolescent boy. Near death, the boy receives a tender kiss from his tormentor before receiving a final blow from a thick piece of lumber.

This compulsive murderer, Klaus, who had been a Nazi concentration camp doctor with a sexual penchant for torturing boys, flees in apparent self-loathing to the parapet of the castle and falls, jumps or is pushed. It leaves him paralyzed and confined to an iron lung in a large, isolated 19th-Century villa. One day an intense pale young man named Angelo (David Sust) turns up at the mansion determined to nurse the helpless Klaus, who has an understandably miserable wife (Marisa Paredes) and a devoted young daughter (Gisella Echavarria). As it turns out, Angelo not only wants revenge but to become Klaus, whom he worships sexually even though he is intent on destroying him. Along the way he will force Klaus to witness two torture deaths of boys.

The point of the depicting this extreme morbidity seems to be to show us how evil, in the form of sexual psychopathology, begets evil. Although Angelo, as an adolescent, had been forced by Klaus to service him sexually, it is hard to accept that this incident, as traumatic and deplorable as it is, would be enough to make Angelo want to assume Klaus’ identity in all its hideousness.

As an exploration of the relationship of sex and violence within a homosexual context, “In a Glass Cage” (Times-rated Mature) is so vague that, intentionally or not, it smacks of homophobia. That Villaronga displays considerable skill as a film maker has the effect of making his film seem all the more dangerous. But it is hard to understand why anyone would want to see this film, let alone make it.