If Dante had taken a detour through a Belgian thrift store, he might have stumbled upon something like Malpertuis—a film so committed to labyrinthine weirdness and theatrical ennui that it feels like it was specifically designed to punish anyone who ever uttered the words “I like surrealism.” Directed by Harry Kümel and starring a visibly disinterested Orson Welles, this cinematic curiosity is a fever dream of bad wigs, waxy taxidermy, and mythological cosplay gone feral.
Let me be clear: Malpertuis is not just a bad film—it’s a punishing film. Watching it feels like being trapped in a haunted house designed by a committee of over-medicated lit majors. It’s like if The Shining had a baby with a Greek myth textbook… and then dropped it down a spiral staircase.
A Plot That Eats Its Own Tail
The film opens with Jan (Mathieu Carrière), a sailor who returns from the sea only to be kidnapped and deposited into the gloomy, gothic estate of Malpertuis—a mansion seemingly built out of cobwebs, sighs, and off-brand LSD. He is surrounded by an ensemble of relatives who all look like they came from the same failed community theater production of Medea. There’s his sister Nancy (Susan Hampshire, playing at least four different roles, each with the emotional range of a department store mannequin), a taxidermist who appears to be embalming the plot along with the animals, and Lampernisse, a cackling madman played by Jean-Pierre Cassel, who seems to think he’s in a Jacques Tati film but ended up in a Bergman nightmare.
At the center of this madness is Uncle Cassavius, played by Orson Welles—well, technically played by Orson Welles. What we actually get is the waxy, swollen corpse of Welles in a Dracula cape, barking cryptic nonsense like a possessed Garfield. Bedridden and bloated, he presides over this family of doomed archetypes like a dying dungeon master with a bottle of brandy hidden under his pillow. He tells the “heirs” that they’ll inherit his estate—so long as they promise never to leave. It’s a bad deal, but honestly, by this point in the film you’re kind of rooting for a carbon monoxide leak.
There are corridors. There are staircases. There are secret doors that lead nowhere. And somewhere amidst all this, there’s a Greek tragedy trying to claw its way out of the script like a trapped gorgon. The family members, it turns out, are all supposed to be gods from ancient mythology, and Cassavius is trying to keep them contained. Or he’s crazy. Or it’s all a dream. Or maybe I had a stroke during the screening.
The Aesthetic: Velvet and Vomit
Let’s talk about the look of Malpertuis, because if you’re going to bore me to death, you might as well do it in style. Kümel—who directed the far superior Daughters of Darkness—does at least try to imbue the film with some visual flair. The production design is thick with musty reds and faded golds, like a once-fancy brothel that now rents rooms by the hour. The camera floats uneasily through the mansion’s decaying splendor, and at times there’s an eerie beauty to it all. Unfortunately, that beauty is crushed under the weight of editing choices that make Eraserhead look like a Pixar film.
Scene transitions are jarring, often feeling like someone hit the remote by accident. Characters disappear and reappear with no explanation. One moment Jan is screaming in existential dread, the next he’s listening to an offscreen narrator quote Ovid in Flemish. It’s a film that takes dream logic and stretches it so far, it becomes sleep paralysis.
The Performances: Funeral Processions with Eyeliner
Poor Mathieu Carrière tries his best with Jan, playing him as a sort of tragic blank slate. He’s the audience surrogate, which is unfortunate, because his primary expression is “mildly confused and extremely damp.” Susan Hampshire plays multiple women—some of whom may be the same person, or sisters, or Greek Furies, or possibly just an acting exercise gone rogue. Her performance is technically accomplished, but even Meryl Streep would’ve struggled to breathe life into these underwritten roles.
And then there’s Orson Welles, bloated and blind in one eye, growling like a man who resents every minute he’s not at lunch. His dialogue is dubbed over in later cuts, and honestly, that’s an act of mercy. In the few scenes where we do hear his voice, he sounds like someone trying to order room service from inside a coffin.
So, What’s It All Mean? (Spoiler: Nothing)
Kümel clearly thinks he’s making an allegory—something profound about identity, madness, and the tragic weight of mythology in a modern world. The problem is, the movie is too busy smothering itself in atmosphere to actually make a coherent point. The gods-as-prisoners metaphor could’ve been haunting if the characters had any dimension beyond “whispers ominously and dies in a hallway.”
The ending is supposed to be revelatory, as Jan uncovers the truth behind Malpertuis. But by the time we get there, you’re so emotionally checked out that the final twist lands with the impact of a moth hitting a window. If there is a message buried in the rubble, it’s probably something like “don’t trust your uncle, especially if he looks like a bloated Nosferatu.”
Versions, Versions, and More Confusion
To make matters worse, the film exists in multiple cuts, each more confusing than the last. The 1972 U.S. version—retitled The Legend of Doom House, presumably to trick horror fans into thinking it involves ghosts or explosions—runs 100 minutes and omits several key scenes. The 1973 “director’s cut” restores 20 minutes of footage, but in doing so, loses Welles’s original voice track.
That’s right: You can either watch a version that makes no sense and sounds like Orson Welles gargling a thesaurus, or one that makes slightly more sense but has someone else pretending to be Welles. It’s like being forced to choose between two flavors of expired yogurt.
Final Verdict: A Cult Classic in the Jonestown Sense
There are people who will insist that Malpertuis is a misunderstood masterpiece. That it’s surreal, poetic, and haunting. Those people are probably the same ones who describe Zardoz as “criminally underrated.” What it actually is, is a grim, nonsensical exercise in arthouse self-indulgence—beautiful to look at, but about as fun as taxidermy with a hangover.
This is not a film to be watched—it’s a film to be survived. And when you come out the other side, blinking and wondering if any of it was real, just remember: sometimes the scariest thing in a horror movie… is the runtime.
½ star out of 4.
