Veit Harlan undeniably deserves Karsten Witte’s epithet "the baroque fascist." He made the loudest, most colorful, most expensive films in the Third Reich as well as Jud Süss, the era’s most offensive feature. He remains a director known for crowd scenes, grand parades, bombastic spectacles, and monumental settings. He was also the Reich’s ultimate melodramatist. Here, a well situated husband strays from a life of privilege and a picture-book marriage to pursue an affair with a mysterious and sickly woman. With its ennui, melancholy, and fatalism, the film becomes a full-blown exercise in morbid abandon, culminating in a hypnotic demonstration of sickness unto death as another transgressive heroine takes her place in Nazi cinema’s gallery of female martyrs.