Swooping into an antique Germany via an initial descent-through-the-clouds that recalls Triumph of the Will, Russian director Alexander Sokurov continues his Faust with a visit to the laboratory of his eponymous anti-hero, who, shadowed by a servile assistant, is busy carving up a naked cadaver. The constantly moving camera glides from a close brush with the corpse s genitals to the organ removals being effected by Faust, and we soon learn that he is not out to understand the body s physical properties but to discover what he believes it contains the seat of the soul.
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The existence and fate of the soul were of course central to Goethe s Faust, the nominal source of this very free, German-language adaptation, but it s safe to say that the concerns of the film largely aren t those of the play. Like Frankenstein, Goethe s tale, though derived from older sources, is one of the literary ur-myths of modernity, divining the demonic, destructive potential lurking wit