Mr And Mrs Stodola

In 2001 and 2002, Jaroslav Stodola and his wife Dana Stodolová committed a series of violent robberies across the regions of Kutná Hora, Jindřichův Hradec and Svitavy, killing several people along the way. They would go on to give very different accounts of what happened. Petr Hátle’s drama, the first substantial fictional exploration of these events, does not endeavour to preserve that uncertainty, finding rather more to sympathise with in one of the characters than the other, but if one bears in mind that parts of it may be more fiction than fact, it’s an interesting character study, as well as one of the more unusual cinematic portraits of a marriage under stress.

Dana (Lucie Žáčková) and Jarda (Jan Hájek) – as she calls him – are not married when we first meet them. She’s the local beauty in a very small town and other men don’t understand what she’s doing with a no-hoper like him at all; she’s out of his league and he knows it, but she plainly enjoys the power that gives her. A dynamic that works for them both sexually and romantically takes on a different cast when she decides to exploit it to better their prospects. Living in Jarda’s mother’s home is frustrating her and she despairs of them ever having enough money to get out. The solution seems simple. One of their neighbours is known to keep a significant sum of money at home. She’ll send Jarda over there to take it from him.

Jarda may be hesitant to commit murder, acting on impulse when the plan goes wrong and immediately regretting it, but he’s not portrayed as a nice guy. Violence comes easily to him even if malice, at least initially, does not. Dana is the other way around. The casual way in which she reaches for sedatives to subdue Jarda’s mother when she feels the slightest annoyance with her is a sign of things to come. Her ease around the police officers who turn up to investigate the old man’s death suggests a complete absence of commonplace emotions. The look which she gives to a local woman whom she sees as a threat, however, will be familiar to anyone who has encountered neighbourly hostility in a small town, all the more unpleasant for its small-mindedness.

Dana is not, however, devoid of emotion. At a pivotal moment in her life – one of just two scenes in the film where she actually feels vulnerable – we see fear building up inside her, almost impossible to contain. It’s superb work from Žáčková and it hints at the traumas of the real Dana’s past, though those are not discussed here. Hátle’s use of small spaces in this scene presents her as someone who feels trapped, whose exertion of control over Jarda and occasionally others is at least in part an attempt to distract herself from a feeling that she has no real agency in her life.

The scenery for the most part is drab and uninspiring, reflecting this sense of despair and limited prospects, but Hátle makes wonderful use of it all the same. There are some fantastically atmospheric scenes in the woods, shot through a maze of blurred, close-up twigs. The frame is often crowded, characters squeezed into cramped interiors, but he always keeps our focus exactly where he wants it to be. In places, the narrative is similarly constructed. It consistently centres on the murderous pair, yet around the edges we see the impact on victims’ relatives, the mood in the community, and the clumsy activities of the police, whose errors famously allowed the couple to get away with a great many of their own.

A world away from cinema’s usual approach to serial killers, Mr And Mrs Stodola offers only a dead end village’s notion of glamour, and not a hint of superior intelligence or deep-rooted psychological compulsion. Killing is just a means to an end, carried out messily, part of a poorly planned life rather than a true route to a better one. The money never lasts and the price of it all keeps getting higher. There are no winners. Hollywood feeds us fantasies, but this is the real thing.