Josephine

After a slow and confused opening, this stylised study of claustrophobic, incestuously possessive familial repression makes compulsive viewing. Josephine assumes her late father's mantle of domestic tyranny, binding mother, sister and crippled brother to an increasingly rigid notion of respectability that shades towards sadism as outside relationships are severed and minor cruelties escalate. A fine, blackly bizarre first film from theatre director Bondy; based on the appropriately-titled novel The Grave of the Living by Franz Nabl, it's both co-scripted and hauntingly acted (as Josephine) by Libgart Schwarz, the wife of Peter Handke.