Vita, a beautiful teenage girl, is asked by a controversial artist to pose as
the Virgin Mary for a painting. She visits his studio and finds herself swept up
into the bizarre world of the artist and his bohemian friends. She seems to see
his paintings come to life and is pursued by strange shadowy figures. Later she
has nightmarish visions of the artist visiting her at night in the form of a
huge spider. The next morning she finds marks on her body that look like the
bites of a large insect.
Vita’s mother becomes worried about her and sends the girl off to stay with
relatives in the countryside, believing that the change of environment will help
her to recover. However, it seems the dark forces that threatened Vita in the
city have followed her and an ancient evil is being awakened that feeds off
Vita’s burgeoning sexuality.
This Latvian shot, Russian language film was produced in the post Glasnost
years of the former Soviet Union, when the barriers were down and previously
unacceptable material was being explored for the first time. This is one of the
very few sex-horror films to come out of that period and still stands today as a
daring and unique production, packed with elaborate and astonishing visual
sequences of morbid eroticism.
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