There was a whole Delphine Seyrig strand at Ritrovato. I’d already seen most of them. But this was a marvellous discovery. Lesbianism is almost a feature of horror films of a certain vintage but rarely as elegantly combined as here: a classic. Seyrig plays a Hungarian Countess, Elizabeth Báthory, made up to recall Dietrich, who arrives to a hotel ,in Ostend, out of season and mostly empty, with her maid Ilona(Andrea Rau), styled to resemble Louise Brooks. The porter tells the Countess  they met forty years earlier but she looks still the same. She tells him it was probably her mother, though the audience is quickly made aware that there’s a legend about her namesake drinking the blood of virgins to keep young, one dating from the middle ages, and that police are currently carrying a whole bunch of dead bodies to the morgue. At the hotel they find a pair of newly-weds – Stefan (John Chirlton) and Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) who can’t keep their hands off each other. He’s from an aristocratic family and is delaying introducing his bride to mother, probably because mother is shown to be a man eating orchids. The Countess is set on seducing Valerie, and part of the seduction is showing her what a violent, brutish, sexist pig her husband is. How will it end? A sexy, stylish film, beautifully shot, dark but with vibrant accents, Seyrig often dressed in Nazi colours, with elements of Surrealism and Expressionism and a focus on transgressive desire that is mostly conveyed through Syrig’s soft, low voice and precise diction. It was so striking that the young woman next to me kept taking her phone out to film particular scenes. When I got annoyed and finally said, ‘really’? She said, ‘yes, really’. I like to think it’s the film that drove her to it but she might just have been a pig.

José Arroyo