Director/Screenplay – Agusti Villaronga, Photography – Jaume Percacula, Music – Javier Navarrete, Special Effects – Reyes Abades, Production Design – Cesc Candini. Production Company – T.E.M. Productores S.A..
David Sust (Angelo), Gunter Meisner (Klaus), Marisa Paredes (Griselda), Gisela Eschevarria (Rena), Inma Colomer (Jornalera), Josue Guash (Boy Singer), David Cuspinera (Bunkhouse Boy)
Klaus, a wanted Nazi war criminal, lives in a South American country with his wife Griselda and young daughter Rena. Klaus has been placed in an iron lung following a suicide attempt where he threw himself from the roof. His wife tends him. They are then joined by Angelo, a local teenager who says he has been sent from the hospital to tend Klaus. However, Griselda soon exposes that Angelo has no medical knowledge. Angelo strips before Klaus, revealing that he read the notebooks that Klaus left behind before he jumped. These detail the cruelties that Klaus inflicted on children during his experiments in the concentration camps and how he became aroused by seeing the children’s fear. Angelo then hangs Griselda from the balcony and taunts Klaus with the body. He next begins to lure children to the house so that he can replicate the cruelties that Klaus describes.
The 1970s and early 80s was a point when European genre cinema was pushing the limits of Censorship Controversy. Works from Italy – in particular, Salo or 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and the notorious Cannibal Holocaust (1979) – went to extremes and ended up being banned around the world. Works from Spain were a little quieter in this regard, nevertheless directors like Jess Franco had taken up the torch.
This period was also the one of the Nazisploitation film – a fad that began in the late 1960s, featuring a good deal in the way of sex and torture scenes set around Nazi Germany. Not to mention this was also a period where Nazi war criminals were in the public eye with the arrest and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961; the discovery of Martin Bormann’s remains in 1972; the false reclamation of Albert Speer as the Good Nazi; while others like Josef Mengele were still at large and had even become turned into a movie villain in The Boys from Brazil (1978).
In a Glass Cage was the first film from Spanish director Agusti Villaronga (1953-2023). Villaronga has since made a number of other films including the fantasy film Moon Child (1989) and the horror film 99.9 (1997). Villaronga later returned to war, in particular the Spanish Civil War, and its after effects in other films such as Aro Tolbukhin: In the Mind of a Killer (2002), Black Bread (2010) and Uncertain Glory (2017).
In a Glass Cage features a fictional Nazi war criminal who, as the film opens, appears to be in exile in an unspecified South American country. Villaronga opens the film with no footholds for us in terms of determining who the characters are or their relationship to one another. One interesting take, somewhat different to most other Nazi portrayals, is that Gunter Meisner is shown as remorseful for his actions and in the later scenes is horrified when David Sust starts killing children in front of him. Also, in that we get detailed readings from his diary, it appears that his interest went from purely the following of orders to a sado-sexual arousal at inflicting cruelty on children – the aspect that no doubt pushed In a Glass Cage into the arena of censorship controversy.
You can also draw analogies between In a Glass Cage and Bryan Singer’s later Stephen King adaptation Apt Pupil (1998). In both films, we see an aging Nazi war criminal in hiding and a youth who becomes inspired by their influence and begins to replicate their actions. I didn’t feel that Apt Pupil did a very good exploration of its idea – Ian McKellen cackling as he tortured cats. On the other hand, In a Glass Cage feels as though it is a much better delineation of the same basic idea, showing a youth being moulded by and starting to mimic the actions of Nazi cruelty.
The film soon gets fairly disturbed with scenes where David Sust comes in to Gunter Meisner in his iron lung at night, where he strips off and reads from Meisner’s accounts of being aroused by the boys he tortures and then jerks off on Meisner’s face. Thereafter we get shock scenes as we see Sust grab wife Marisa Paredes, throw a rope around her neck and then hang her from the balcony of the stairs, all before dragging her dead body in and draping it over Gunter Meisner’s iron lung. This is followed by scenes where he abducts boys and brings them home to torture and kill as Gunter Meisner is forced to watch.
Trailer here