This movie starts and ends with a rather elegant-looking large music box. A large metal wheel with notches cut out moves up into place, and the backlighting makes it look like a sky full of stars. In the beginning, there's an opera performance in a well-lit tent that is painted fancifully.
There's some beautiful and interesting images in this movie like that, and the cinematography might be very good but it is hard to judge from the pan & scan job I watched. However, the movie didn't work for me as drama or horror.
A romantically-inclined and perhaps naive young woman is proposed to by a shy, polite, awkward man she's known since childhood. Her mother is pleased with him, even though he's much poorer than their family. The young woman is more interested in a "saintly sinner" who hangs out at a saloon playing cards. What sort of relationship they have, if any, isn't clear. She sends him a poem, and he comes out to meet her, but doesn't talk at all except to repeatedly say "don't touch me!" when she tries to, and he even puts a gun to his head to drive the point home!
So, she marries the awkward guy, but doesn't want to have sex with him. She writes her mother claiming he doesn't want to touch her. One morning she finds him boarding up the windows from the inside, and she doesn't seem surprised by this. That evening she gets scared as he tells her he'll be spending the night outside, and she's not to let him in.
I've got to say, I didn't understand this movie. The ending made no sense to me. It's not surreal, it just doesn't explain itself well. Another user praised a scene in which several characters have a meal together without talking. I thought it was ridiculous. Perhaps there's something more interesting about it when it is in widescreen.
Definitely not recommended to anyone expecting a horror movie. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone looking for a drama either, though.
