Daas

Poland. Highly recommended.
I liked this more than anyone else I have talked with. I think it compares favorably to “Chinatown”, but I got a weird look when I said that.  A movie about a major historical event that I never really heard of. Set in 1776, of all years, in Vienna centered on a cult led by Jacob Frank, a Polish Jew who had lived in Turkey and who had decided he was the messiah. Also he could grant immortality. At the time he was a really big deal. He encouraged his people to commit all the sins they could because conventional morality is for suckers.  Good way for a cult leader to do what cult leaders do which is so very often to have sex with as many cult followers as they can manage.

Most of the action of the movie centers on a couple of guys trying to bring him down for all the bad stuff he did. Last Honest Man stuff. Its not a movie about Jacob Frank, it’s a movie about guys trying to get the right thing done with the Hapsburg version of the cops and the courts and the inside players and the dangerous thugs.

As always with period movies, I could not get enough of the great clothes these guys wore. Also, part of the storytelling includes a woman who had locked in syndrome after a stroke, and boy was she treated right. Really, normalization at its best.