Strangler vs Strangler

There is a killer in Belgrade strangling women. He sells carnations in the street, lives with his mother and draws nobody's attention. Ognjen, the inspector on the case, is dishevelled, obsessive and not taken seriously by his own team. A rock musician also appears, makes songs out of the murders and becomes famous. Slobodan Šijan directs. The genre is black comedy. The killer's scenes proceed in the shape of horror, the police passages are comedy and the musician is satire; the three tones are deliberately mixed. The target is murder turning into cultural material. The city talks about the deaths, the papers run headlines, and somebody makes a career of it; the film takes that on directly. Šijan was known in Yugoslav cinema for popular comedies and this counts as the strangest work of his career. The mother is at the centre; everything the killer does attaches to his relationship with her, and an open link is made to Psycho. The image and the use of colour are deliberately artificial; the scenes look as if built in a studio. It was not fully understood in Yugoslavia at the time and became a cult film later. Who it is for: anyone curious about black comedy and eighties Yugoslav cinema. Who it is not for: the tone is uneven, the humour is very particular, and the women exist only as victims.