AllMovie

This independent film production attempts to bring to the screen a highly evocative, difficult novel by Ernst Weiss, published in 1919. Weiss, along with Stefan Zweig and Franz Kafka, wrote symbolically rich, sometimes fantastical tales embodying the despairing and pessimistic zeitgeist of the era. In this story, a soldier in the trenches in World War One is up to some personal mayhem of his own, raping a woman whose cow he has just stolen for food, when he is unmanned (literally) by an explosion. When he returns to his family after the war, he is unable to forget his crimes or the cosmic punishment he received for them, and is nearly impossible to live with.