The aging midwife Hadoula walks the rugged paths of her male-dominated world in The Murderess, her skilled hands shifting from their past role of birthing babies to ending lives. The barren Greek island displays no beauty against the Aegean Sea. Here, people judge life by its practical value, and families grieve when girls are born.
The film shows a dark reality where killing baby girls becomes expected, born from an economic system that sees daughters as financial burdens, their marriage payments crushing poor families. As someone who helps women during birth, Hadoula sees their ongoing hardships clearly. She starts killing instead of protecting life, making her both evil and protective – her acts try to save girls from lives filled with service and abuse.
The film makes us ask if Hadoula fights against or supports evil. Each time she kills brings both anger at society and madness. The empty island reflects her broken mind, raising questions about fighting a bad system through violence. She acts in ways that make us think about power, death, and what happens when someone breaks.
Echoes of Oppression: The Haunting Souls of The Murderess
Karyofyllia Karabeti plays Hadoula as an expression of grief passed down through time, carrying the pain and fight of many women before her. She changes from a tired midwife into someone who kills while thinking she saves others. Karabeti shows this shift with exact detail – her body looks worn from years of work, her eyes mix determination with doubt. She makes Hadoula real, showing how each baby’s death marks her deeper.
Other actors play roles that feel like ghosts made by the heavy mood of the island. Maria Protopappa acts as Hadoula’s mother with cold strength. She shows up in memories and dreams, speaking words that keep old rules alive. Through her, we see how hurt people pass down hurt, making those who suffered keep the same bad rules going.
The other actors show the dark social order. Girls stay quiet, knowing they’ll need marriage money and have few choices. Men appear as cruel figures: mean husbands, a priest who misses what’s wrong, a drunk son-in-law stuck in his failures.
Memory mixes with now in Hadoula’s troubled mind. Her mother’s harsh words, her daughters’ trapped lives, the empty land – all push her to act. Each person she knows pulls her deeper into the system she tries to fight. Her fight belongs to her alone yet speaks for many, showing how being pushed down can turn someone into both the pushed and the pusher.
Landscapes of Despair: The Visual Elegy of The Murderess
The island appears alive in The Murderess, matching Hadoula’s broken mind. Raw mountains stand like frozen pain from old times. Mist covers everything, smothering hope, as gray, brown, and pale green paint a tired world. This Greece shows no bright beaches or blue water – just rock and darkness, its looks scraped down to bones.
Panagiotis Vasilakis photographs this empty place like a painter. He shows Hadoula tiny against the big, cold world around her. The few bright spots look icy, making things worse instead of better.
Old scenes mix into now without clear lines, like bad dreams and real life work together to keep Hadoula stuck in pain. Her mother’s hard face stays in view, as heavy as the island’s weight. Each picture makes viewers feel trapped, sad, and unable to escape.
The movie’s look mixes real life with scary stories from both mind and folk tales. Old houses falling apart, big empty mountains, and a quiet church show Hadoula getting worse. The island sits between real and fake, where outside things blend with what’s in her head. The movie puts these pieces together to make dark art, where every dark spot and rock shows how pain moves from parent to child.
Threads of Defiance: Eva Nathena’s Vision in The Murderess
Eva Nathena’s first film digs into Alexandros Papadiamantis’s novella, making it speak to both old and new times. She takes The Murderess and builds it new – looking at how people pass down bad treatment like they pass down old things.
Her work making costumes and sets shows in all scenes; she puts every small thing just so, making the whole place work against Hadoula. Rocks, wood, cloth look tired from work, and the island’s dull colors seem to drink up any life left.
Nathena shifts from the book’s plain style and shows scary things growing in Hadoula’s head. The book stops short of saying what happens, but the movie makes Hadoula face her mother’s ghost – who stands for old rules that won’t die.
This makes the story about hurt moving from mothers to daughters, with Hadoula fighting both men who think little of women and women who make other women obey. Strange sights – her mother showing up, mixed-up memories – make Hadoula’s inner world as scary as the outer one.
The movie shows what’s wrong with how society treats women, making old problems feel new. Nathena’s Hadoula shows all the ways society breaks people down. She kills both to fight back and to give in – showing how deep men’s control goes in her mind. This way of telling the story asks what parts of Hadoula’s time still stay with us.
Sacred Shadows: The Symbolic Weight of The Murderess
Religion gives no way out in The Murderess; it stands both as shelter and trap. Hadoula thinks the Virgin Mary guides her to kill babies, seeing death as holy help, wrapping murder in church words.
The old chapel, its walls falling and pictures fading, sits between holy and evil. Its weak pictures match Hadoula’s broken faith, which brings no peace but backs her fight. She prays without wanting to be saved, asking to be proved right. Her god stays quiet while humans do bloody work.
The movie shows male control in all its parts. Marriage costs, beaten wives, strict rules for each sex build Hadoula’s life, where women become things used for work. This bad treatment moves from old to young like magic gone wrong. Hadoula’s mother makes these rules stay alive, showing how hurt people often keep hurting others.
The island stands hard and cold, showing trapped lives. Steep rocks and empty land match how alone and stuck Hadoula stays. The ground, like the people living there, gives no place to rest. People think they can run away, but all roads lead back to the same tight spot.
The Light and Shadow of The Murderess
Karabeti makes The Murderess work through her acting, which stays quiet yet shows deep hurt. She plays Hadoula with open pain and many sides, a broken person whose face shows years of family pain.
The movie looks gray and bare, matching Hadoula’s empty life, pulling viewers to a place where being alone and pushed down feels real like the rocks. The movie looks hard at how men and groups treat each other, making us see how bad treatment keeps going around.
The movie has weak spots. Other people stay flat next to full-drawn Hadoula, looking like signs instead of real humans. Their thin roles make some scenes feel fake.
The movie keeps using the same pictures – mist, fuzzy church pictures, sharp rocks – too much, making them mean less after a while. The movie stays so dark that people wanting any good feelings might stop watching, stuck in the same tight spot the movie draws so well.
Timeless Shadows: The Cultural Resonance of The Murderess
The Murderess speaks about things we still see today, past its old Greek island. Hadoula’s life looks like news stories now, like the ones from #MeToo.
Eva Nathena takes Papadiamantis’s book and shows old pain that stays with us, marks left on our bodies and minds, passed down through families. People still pay to marry, stay quiet, serve others – they just hide it better now.
The movie makes people think. Instead of giving easy fixes, it shows hard facts about how groups crush some people, trade them like things, keep them small.
This new take on the old story changes it from a sad tale to angry words about men making rules. People can’t stop watching Hadoula hurt, fight back, live in her hard place. The same things that hurt her then hurt people now.
The Review
The Murderess
The Murderess shows how pain moves between parents and children under crushing rules, made strong by Karyofyllia Karabeti's scary good acting and Eva Nathena's clear film style. The movie stays dark and side people lack depth, which might push some people away. Still, the movie looks good and reads Papadiamantis's book in a new woman-centered way that still fits today. It sticks in your head, showing hard truths about hurt that goes round and round, and what happens when someone fights back.
PROS
- Karyofyllia Karabeti’s deeply expressive and haunting performance as Hadoula.
- Striking, atmospheric visuals that evoke isolation and despair.
- Bold feminist reinterpretation of Papadiamantis’s novella.
- Unflinching critique of patriarchy and intergenerational trauma.
CONS
- Supporting characters lack depth, diminishing emotional impact.
- Repetitive use of visual metaphors, risking thematic overstatement.
