Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)
Let me be straight with you before anything else: if you are thinking about sitting down with Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, you deserve to know what you are actually getting into. Because the way this film tends to be packaged and sold, as a whimsical, avant-garde surrealist horror fable about puberty, is doing a lot of heavy lifting to obscure some genuinely disturbing content. I wish someone had told me plainly. So consider this that warning.
The standard academic pitch is not entirely wrong, technically speaking. Jaromil Jireš is clearly working in a tradition of Czech New Wave surrealism, and there are moments here that feel like they belong to that lineage. I've spent time with Daisies (1966) and The Firemen's Ball (1967), and I understand what that movement was capable of at its best: wit, subversion, genuine strangeness in service of something meaningful. This film shares some of that visual DNA. The Technicolor cinematography is genuinely striking, saturated and dreamlike in a way that keeps you slightly off-balance, and the score is, I'll admit, beautiful. On a purely aesthetic level, there are images here that linger. The gothic fairy-tale atmosphere around young Valerie has a real tactile quality to it, and the practical make-up work on the vampire figures is impressive, adding to the sense of a dark folk story half-remembered from a fever dream.
But here is the thing about artistic merit: it does not function as a moral blank cheque. And this film spends that goodwill fast.
The horror elements, the vampires and the shadowy patriarchal figures circling Valerie, are clearly framed as social commentary on the forces that seek to control and possess young women as they come of age. Fine. That is a legitimate and potentially rich subject. The problem is the execution, which crosses into territory I cannot dress up or contextualise into acceptability. Attempted incest. Gratuitous nudity involving a child. Sequences that do not feel provocative in any meaningful sense, just deeply uncomfortable, and entirely without justification in what they ask you to witness. These are not scenes that unsettle you in the way good horror does, the kind that leaves you thinking. They are scenes that leave you feeling hollowed out and vaguely contaminated.
No amount of vibrant cinematography papers over that. The beauty of the images does not redeem what those images sometimes contain. If anything, the contrast makes it worse, because you are being asked to find something aesthetically pleasurable in a frame that has no business being pleasurable.
I have read the defences. The film as feminist text. The film as a girl reclaiming her own narrative from predatory adult structures. I understand the argument. I do not think the argument survives contact with what is actually on screen. Jireš may well have intended a subversive critique of patriarchal society and the way it preys on young women. But intention and execution are different things, and the execution here is, to put it plainly, morally bankrupt.
What frustrates me most, honestly, is the near-total absence of content warnings attached to modern screenings and releases of this film. It gets programmed at festivals and revival cinemas under its dreamy, poetic reputation, and audiences go in expecting something strange and beautiful and boundary-pushing in a manageable sense. What they sometimes get is something that crosses a line most people would want to know about in advance. That is not a small omission.
One and a half stars, and both of those are for the cinematography and the score, which genuinely are doing something worthwhile. The rest of it I cannot recommend to anyone, and I would not feel right sending you in without saying so clearly.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 1970 | Watched: 2026-07-27
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