BLOGTOBER 10/18/2025: BELLADONNA OF SADNESS
It seems like I had been waiting a lifetime to see this much-lauded masterpiece of erotic -- and, arguably, feminist -- animation, and now that I finally have, I'm not really sure how I feel about it. BELLADONNA OF SADNESS is undeniably fascinating, original, and often visually astounding, but it is also over-indulgent, suffocatingly repetitive, and morally confusing. Some of those accusations may sound myopic given that this is essentially a work of pornography, but it also strives to be more than that, which begs these slippery questions.
[FYI I'm going to spoil this entire thing.]
In medieval France, the beautiful young Jeanne's wedding to her beloved Jean is spoiled by a prima nocta gang rape ordered by the local baron. The shame of this drives the shallow, cowardly Jean to try to murder Jeanne, who, in her weak and defiled state, then falls prey to the devil. The phallic demon rapes her repeatedly, growing more powerful with each violation -- but so, too, does Jeanne acquire powers of her own. Anyone expecting a satisfying rape-revenge tale will be disappointed when Jeanne's witchy abilities draw the traditional response from the authorities, but her inevitable martyrdom inspires an inner awakening in the female witnesses, and her enduring influence ultimately inspires the French Revolution. Huh.
I finally got around to checking this box because one of my recent guest lecturers for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, Payton McCarty-Simas, centered it in her talk on feminist themes in psychedelic witch films. Payton's arguments were certainly exciting and compelling, but I had a hard time receiving BELLADONNA as an unambiguous liberation narrative -- and not just because it largely consists of an endless chain of eroticized rape scenes. I don't actually have a major problem with that in and of itself. My problem is more related to the fact that I see this less as a witch film than as a demonic possession movie, which is contingent on the victimhood of the protagonist. Jeanne isn't exactly asked whether or not she would prefer to live deliciously, nor does she seem to develop a sense of righteous anger on her own. While the demonic rapes imbue Jeanne with magical powers, the elegant woman who dominates her village doesn't seem to be exactly the same woman who is miserably tortured and humiliated by the monster in her bedroom. Whatever self-actualization she achieves comes at the cost of extreme, involuntary degradation, which tends to undermine her otherwise-exciting monologue about the virtues of "becoming a horrifying woman." And like, I definitely don't mean to say that the artist's intention is the be-all end-all of what a movie is about, but it was meaningful to me when Payton pointed out that filmmaker Eiichi Yamamoto was unhappy with the realization that BELLADONNA'S main fanbase was female.
None of this is to say that I couldn't enjoy BELLADONNA OF SADNESS, or even that my main problems with it were moral. I don't care THAT much about whether this is genuinely pro-woman. What is harder for me is that passages of truly astonishing creative invention are followed by sequences that are so mercilessly repetitive that I began to feel like somebody was holding my head underwater. I could endure this intensifying claustrophobia knowing that the future held more startling and unpredictable visual delights, but in the meantime I sometimes felt like this 86-minute movie was taking my entire life to get through. Maybe that's a minor complaint for an exploitation movie, and especially for one that often shows you something you've never seen before and may never see again! Mainly I just mean to say that on every level I had an extremely ambivalent experience with BELLADONNA OF SADNESS, which I found to be simultaneously amazing and overrated. Maybe I should just admit that this is in some ways more valuable than a film that simply aims to please.
