Patrick Davenant invites a group of friends to visit a theater inside his villa, a place which later reveals itself as sinister. Within a short time, the guests realize that they are trapped in the villa. A merciless killer then begins to murder them one by one.
In 1840, a samurai comes home to find his wife in bed with another man, so he kills them both and then himself. Flash-forward to the present day, and an American family of three moves into this since-abandoned house and starts to experience incidents of haunting and possession.
The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Colog…