Marmorera (2007)

The Zurich psychiatrist Simon Cavegn is on his honeymoon trip with his newlywed wife Paula, on their way to his hometown of Marmorera. During the drive, a squirrel that seems to appear out of nowhere jumps in front of their car. After braking hard, however, he cannot find it. While the two visit the old cemetery, a cutaway shows an angler on the reservoir hooking a woman’s corpse. When they reach the lake, they walk along the earth-fill dam and take pictures of themselves with the lake in the background. The boat can also be seen, but the fisherman is nowhere to be seen. When the couple turns back toward the lake, they see only the woman lying on the boat at the shore, which has meanwhile drifted onto land; Simon has to confirm that she is dead. On his account, the police are called and search for the fisherman with divers, finding him dead in the lake near the old cemetery. It appears that, unfortunately, he strangled himself with his own fishing line. Meanwhile, the young woman comes back to life in the ambulance, and paramedic Thomas Palottas is seriously injured when he tries to treat her with a defibrillator. At the hospital, all the medical equipment is found to be displaying completely nonsensical readings for her. With no identity and no language, she is flown by helicopter to the Burghölzli University Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich, where Cavegn works; radio communication fails during the flight. At the chief physician Prof. Ball’s instruction, Cavegn takes her into his care and names her Julia, “after the mountain stream that flows into the reservoir.” Meanwhile, more bizarre deaths occur. The clinic’s patient Lozzo, Palottas’s father—who is also the proprietor of the restaurant overlooking the reservoir where the couple had stopped earlier—the power plant’s chief engineer, the retired hunter Sonderegger, and finally the investigating police commissioner Motta all die, after Motta has paid the psychiatrist a late-night visit. Cavegn discovers that there have also been unexplained deaths in his own family. In every case, water or electricity played a fatal role. He suspects a connection between all these events and his patient, especially when he discovers that the films he uses to document his sessions with her are shaky and show scenes he did not record. In addition, electrical and electronic devices and equipment around him suddenly begin malfunctioning for no apparent reason, and he often encounters squirrels, for example in pictures and coats of arms. Julia even escapes from the clinic, goes to Cavegn’s house, rummages through it, finds his wife’s wedding dress, and puts it on. Unexpected help comes from Giovanoli, the cemetery caretaker and gravedigger, who once organized resistance to the flooding of the valley and lives in the still-existing house called “La Resistenza.” He believes the deaths are connected to the referendum on whether or not to flood the valley. Cavegn suspects that Zurich, whose energy supply the reservoir was originally built to serve, could also be among the possible sites of further deaths. But the more Cavegn cares for his patient, the more estranged he becomes from his wife and the world around him. Prof. Ball puts him on leave because he hears Julia speaking, even though medical reports show that she has no language center. Suddenly, he can foresee things and, through the strange sequences on his videos and his “coincidental” choice of music, he senses who may be the next to die. When he sees the young paramedic going into the lake, he jumps in after him to save him, and later comes to in a hospital. Giovanoli “kidnaps” him from there to tell him that he is right in thinking that Zurich, too, could become a target of the strange deaths. His delusion goes so far that, near the end of the film, he puts himself in danger. While his baby is being born, he receives a call from the restaurant saying that “she [Julia] is back” and that the church steeple of sunken Marmorera is once again visible above the lake. When a squirrel jumps against his windshield on the drive there, he loses control of his car. The film ends with Simon finding himself on the bottom of the reservoir in the time before the valley was flooded and seeing Julia in a window of one of the old houses. After that, the city of Zurich is shown at night, with all its lights gradually going out as sirens wail in the background.