Salo Lite

Film: In a Glass Cage (Tras en cristal)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There are times when I know I’m going to get hurt by the movie that I am watching. Sometimes, this is an experience that, as rough as it is, is something that is worth doing. Come and See is a film like that. I don’t want to watch it again, but I’m happy I watched it. Sometimes, I’m there to tick a box, as was the case with Salo, a film that scarred me enough that I remember pretty much everything about that viewing. Rarely, I get something like In a Glass Cage (Tras en cristal, a film that is unpleasant in terms of topic and characters, but felt as middle of the road as any film I’ve seen in some time in terms of quality.

There are some connections that In a Glass Cage has with other media. I’d be shocked if you told me that the film’s writer/director wasn’t familiar with the Stephen King novella Apt Pupil. While the stories aren’t identical, they are certainly similar in a lot of respects. There’s also a great deal of Salo in this movie, oddly. There’s nothing as overtly disgusting as the coprophagia scenes in that movie, but the destructive, awful hedonism is certainly in both films. It took me a bit to make that connection, but it’s definitely there.

The film opens with Klaus (Günter Meisner), a former Nazi doctor, torturing a young boy. We’ll learn eventually that Klaus has a history of torturing young boys to death and sexually assaulting them. While he is dealing with his latest victim, Angelo (David Sust), another of his victims, sneaks in while he is killing the young boy chained to the ceiling. Angelo steals something while Klaus’s back is turned, and shortly afterwards, Klaus attempts to kill himself by throwing himself from a tower. The attempt fails—he ends up paralyzed and is forced to live in an iron lung, where his wife Griselda (Marisa Paredes) takes care of him. Also in the house is Rena (Giselle Echevarria), their child.

And soon enough, Angelo shows up. He’s got Klaus’s notes of what he did to young boys in Germany during the war, Klaus is now stuck in an iron lung, and if Angelo can get himself hired on, he’ll be in the perfect place to exact his revenge. This is exactly what happens—Klaus becomes a victim of Angelo’s weird and terrible revenge.

That’s really it, so the thing that becomes important is the kind of revenge that is happening. What we get is the realization that Angelo wants to recreate some of Klaus’s crimes, all of which are incredibly upsetting. Angelo manages to bump off Griselda and fires the rest of the staff. Rena doesn’t have a huge problem with any of this (her mother seemed to abuse her), and Angelo goes to work finding young boys to bring into the room with the iron lung so he can go about killing them in ways to reimagine these moments from Klaus’s notes during the war.

Make no mistake here; In a Glass Cage does not want to downplay exactly the amount of child sexual abuse that happens in the past and present of the film. There is a great deal of implication that some of Angelo’s revenge comes in the form of abusing Rena in the way that he was abused by Klaus, but it’s never really stated ostensibly. Angelo does what he can to get perfect duplications of Klaus’s crimes, many of which appear to have been both disturbing and incredibly sexually gratifying. It’s that kind of movie.

The truth is that In a Glass Cage is an ugly movie. That’s more or less what it’s trying to do here. It wants to be unpleasant, because that is how it is going to make its bones. And it is noteworthy in just how unpleasant it really is. The problem is that it doesn’t have the moral sweep and power of something like Come and See. And, while it certainly has some themes in common with Salo, it’s not overtly horrifying and terrible enough to sear itself into one’s brain.

It is memorable, though. It is incredibly unpleasant, which is what it wants. In that, it succeeds, even if there’s a lot here that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

Why to watch In a Glass Cage: If you’re looking to make yourself upset, this is what you want.
Why not to watch: It’s genuinely unpleasant.