by Francesca Kritikos
It’s not romantic. It’s a biblical story.
People often say they are looking for someone to be in a relationship with to help make them better than they are. In fact some may view that as the goal of a partnership: to make each other better versions of who they each, originally, were. But what if the opposite were an equally noble goal: to make each other worse?
I recently watched The Night Porter (dir. Liliana Cavani, 1974) for the very first time. I really had no context for this film going in, and I’m not going to provide a summary of it here. It’s certainly controversial, and I’m in no place to provide a moral judgment on it (it’s based loosely on a true story, for whatever that’s worth). What I will say is that it made me think about eroticism and love and the mechanisms of the human body and soul more than any other work of art I’ve viewed or consumed in a long time.
Since the movie ended I’ve had three thoughts circling endlessly in my mind.
*
Memory is not made of shadows, but of eyes which can stare straight at you and fingers which point at you.
Our bodies do not understand the difference between the present and the past. I think this is, fundamentally, the cause of a lot of our (my) problems.
For example in less than 10 seconds I can think back to being 15, in my sophomore year of high school, listening to Nirvana on my headphones in class because I was done with the assignment. After a few minutes I realized that everyone was staring at me: the teacher came over to my desk and asked me to lower the volume. I was immediately flushed with embarrassment, because obviously the music was too loud, I had it at the maximum possible volume. It was just that I needed to create a kind of distance between myself and the world around me, and so used the sound as a physical barrier. And perhaps also it is that, subconsciously, I wanted to be noticed, because I wanted those feelings to be tangible and graspable to others.
Each time I think of this moment, I am in an acute physical pain, because I remember being 15 and unhappy and alone, and on top of that, deeply humiliated, that I showed my cards this way. I remember it, and it is like I never left, although it was almost fifteen years ago now.
Lucia and Max run into each other by chance twelve years after their last encounter, and it is like no time has passed at all. “She’s exactly the same as she was for me,” Max says. “As she was then.” Lucia sends her husband away, and seems to intuitively know where Max lives and how to get into his apartment. Immediately she makes herself at home there, smashing glass on his bathroom floor for him to step in. They return to their routines of causing one another pain, as if the pain had never stopped, because, for them, it hadn’t.
The cycles of the past repeat, bastardized: trapped in Max’s apartment with no way to get food, they are forced to ration what they have, and begin to suffer from malnourishment. But something has changed this time around: Max no longer has any power, and Lucia, inversely, does. She could call her husband or the police and be set free, but something prevents her from doing this.
Does she miss her powerlessness? Or is she just unaware of her own agency? I would argue that the former is more true than the latter. “That’s my affair,” she says, when questioned on her relationship with Max. When she asks him for the keys to her chain, he gives them to her. “Tell me what you want,” Max says to her. “Tell me what to do.”
Max will have to answer to the law and to his peers, and he is keenly aware that his time is running out. He has run back to the past, and while the language seems the same, the words have different meanings. Still, he is determined to act it out until the end, when the weapon he once wielded is turned on him, and the girl he once protected he has led to death.
*
When all seems lost, something unexpected happens. Ghosts take shape in the mind. How can one pull away from it? This phantom. With a voice and a body. This part of one’s self.
It’s an overused phrase, but Lucia and Max are two people who “match each other’s freak,” if you will. It makes for extremely satisfying viewing: she tricks Max into stepping in glass, causing his foot to bleed, then places her hand under his raised heel so that he can grind it back into the shards. When they’re meant to be rationing food, she scoops handfuls of jam out of a jar, starving as she is, and they wrestle over it until they’re both filthy.
It’s hard to say if seeing Lucia again makes Max crave the power over her he once had or if, on some level, he makes himself powerless to her, perhaps as a way of seeking her forgiveness. (“I have a sense of shame in the light,” Max confesses.) What’s clear when watching, what the film really makes the viewer believe, is that there is no other person that either of the two could possibly be with, for better or, in this case, for worse.
Vogler tells Lucia she must be ill to allow herself to return to Max this way, and while she dismisses him, the truth is that he is, of course, right. It is also true, however, that her sickness is inextricable from who she is as a person. Similarly, when Max quits his job so that he can spend all of his time in his apartment with Lucia, it is clear that these are not the actions of well-adjusted people. But these progressions feel so natural as to seem inevitable.
The downward spiral can, after all, be found in nature. There are some currents that will drown you, without you having to do anything at all, really.
Love is a force of nature, and the thing about nature is that it has absolutely nothing to do with peace, safety, or mercy.
*
I’m rotten and I’ll stay rotten.
Love and hate, sister and brother, are perhaps the only two emotions that can carry us to violence. Anger and lust are their shared children, the sick children of incest.
The lovers in The Night Porter are also, of course, enemies; that’s implied in the very premise of the film. They hate each other as much as they love one another, and rather than these emotions cancelling each other out, they amplify each other.
No, this is not a romantic story.
In a way I can’t help but interpret this film as a kind of cautionary tale, biblical in its breadth, relevant far beyond the historic period in which it takes place. We must be careful with our love, so easily can it degrade into something dark and powerful, something which is capable of debasing us irreversibly. We must be even more careful with our hate, with what and who we hate, lest we end up not being able to live without them.
Who you love is who you die with. Who you hate is who you die for. Maybe, if we’re lucky, they’re the same.
****
Francesca Kritikos is the editor in chief of SARKA, a journal and publisher focused on works of the flesh. Her poetry collection, The season of lilacs is monstrous, was released by Blush Lit in October 2025 after being longlisted for the International Metatron Poetry Prize. Her writing has been published in English, French and Greek in numerous online and print journals. Her debut novel is slated for publication in 2027.