Effigy: Poison and the City

"Effigy: Poison and the City" has all the hallmarks of a crisp historical drama. It's based on the true story of Gesche Gottfried, a German woman who was discovered to have killed 15 people in Bremen and Hanover during the early 1800s. She was actually a beloved person in the community because of her generosity in feeding the poor and because she'd experienced so much tragedy in her own life -- losing two husbands, a fiance and her own children to disease.

Or so everyone thought. It wasn't unusual in the Napoleonic era for people to suddenly fall ill and die, from the very young to the very old. The 1815 cholera epidemic made what we're going through right now pale in comparison.

So the film, written and directed by rookie Udo Flohr (with a co-screenwriting credit by Peer Meter), takes the tact of being almost like a historical true-crime drama along with a feminist-tilted look at how women were perceived at that time.

Suzan Anbeh plays Frauline Gottfried as a sort of seductive, passive Hannibal Lecter figure, cooing and flirting with the men investigating her while easily misleading the townsfolk as to the true nature of the mysterious ailments and deaths. Christoph Gottschalch plays Drost, the local judge-slash-investigator, as well as an influential politician. An older bachelor, he himself falls briefly under her spell as she smiles and manipulates him with ease.

Elisa Thiemann plays Cato Böhmer, an ambitious young aspiring attorney who has been assigned to Drost, much to his misgiving. Back then women weren't allowed to enter law school, but Böhmer learned on her own and actually seems to have more criminal investigative experience than Drost. She, like everyone else, takes an early shine to the charming Gottfried but grows suspicious long before anyone else does.

Gottfried's M.O. was to use something called "mouse butter" to taint people's food, a combination of congealed fat and arsenic flakes used to kill rodents. Some of her victims noticed the white residue on their food but never put two and two together, since the symptoms can look much like cholera or food poisoning.

Anbeh is an alluring and mysterious screen presence who artfully plays on the emotions and perceptions of the other characters. She's a master of misdirection, using her feminine wiles, for instance, to claim she's afraid to return to the residence where she works because of the ongoing investigation, and thus becomes ensconced in Drost's pen as a guest -- where she can continue her quiet rampage run under his nose.

Some other story elements don't really mesh in well. I kept wanting the film to become a tale of Gottfried and Böhmer going head to head, using the limited but honed tools at their disposal to vie against each other and put the dunderheaded men in their place. But it never really happens. Some narration English that doesn't very much resemble the actresses' spoken German doesn't help.

The costumes and sets are quite convincing, though Flohr shoots everything in a very bright, flat way that it feels more like a television drama than a hazy historical recollection. I'm not sure if that was an errant artistic choice or just a function of a limited budget.

"Effigy" is an interesting film, but ultimately the idea for the story is better than the movie they actually made.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR5-Q8yeias[/embed]