Rent The Ear (1970)

This is NOT a comedy! - The Ear review by DC

With its fair share of melodrama, this sometimes feels like "Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf". The film explores the paranoia that arises when you don't know who is watching and who is listening and who is out to get you, when anything you say could potentially be against the law - a tactic used by despots throughout the world, even in 'civilised' countries.

Every Row a Confession - The Ear review by griggs

Finished in 1969 and immediately locked in a vault, The Ear didn't reach audiences until the Velvet Revolution made it safe to look. The irony is almost too neat: suppressed by exactly the system it depicts.

Karel Kachyna keeps the whole thing to one night, one house, one couple. Ludvík and Anna come home from a Party gathering to find the locks changed and the lights cut. It has the same Kafka DNA as Welles's The Trial — ordinary man, nameless threat, nowhere to appeal — except Ludvík doesn't even get Josef K.'s courtroom. Just a dark house and the sound of people moving around outside it.

The political terror and the marriage are the same story. Anna's rows might be overheard; her accusations become potential confessions. Bohdalová plays her drunk, sharp and faintly reckless — the kind of person who might blow everything up just to see what happens. She's the best thing in it.

The middle sags, and endurance is the point — which only excuses so much. But the ending reframes everything quietly and nastily. By the time it's over, even the relief feels like a trap.