Malina (1991)

A nameless writer has lived with Malina in an apartment in Vienna for years. But theirs is more of a practical arrangement, since Malina gives her the support she needs when she is confused, loses her grip on reality, or doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going. When she falls in love with Ivan, a young Hungarian man who increasingly rebuffs her advances and instead begins an affair with another woman, she gradually loses her footing—and her grasp on reality. Malina then seems to be a rescuer in her hour of need, or perhaps rather a demon: her male alter ego, who appears to her in her visions and orders her to kill Ivan. In the end, the writer disappears without a trace into the wall, and Malina removes every sign of her existence from their shared apartment, as if she had never been there. But at the very end, the vanished woman’s verdict thunders out: “It was murder.” With this voice from nowhere, director Werner Schroeter goes beyond Jelinek’s screenplay, in which the female side of the writer left only a note with the words “It was murder,” which her male side disposed of.