Greek Midwife’s Mental Spiral Fails to Cohere

With a title like “Murderess,” there can be little surprise where Greece’s submission to the Oscar international feature category is headed. The third adaptation of Alexandros Papadiamantis’s acclaimed novella follows the slow psychological unraveling of an elderly midwife as she contends with the ever-worsening patriarchal society she aides. Though director Eva Nathena and screenwriter Katerina Bei attempt to trace out their protagonist’s state of mind, it is frequently lost in a muddled approach to blending cold reality with feverish flashbacks and fantasy.

Marked by an endemic sense of isolation, “Murderess” begins with a group of unidentified girls dancing in a circle, singing a song wishing that there were only boys in their midst. Following a quotation from Greek poet Odysseas Elytis about the inevitability of the past asserting itself in the present, Hadoula (Karyofyllia Karabeti) is introduced as she is so often seen in the film: walking briskly amid rocky terrain to aid a woman in the throes of childbirth. To the chagrin of the whole room, the baby is a girl, the latest in a seemingly unbroken streak of female births on the Aegean island of Skiathos.

Though “Murderess” takes place sometime in the early 20th century, its appearance and characters’ sensibilities seem to belong to a far earlier period. Boys, almost wholly unseen during the course of the film, are prized to an even greater extent than they would by the average society, and women routinely attempt to use herbs and other treatments prescribed by Hadoula to ensure that they will have a son. None of these efforts seem to come to anything, and the requisite pause of anticipation and subsequent depressive or angry reaction informs the bulk of the character dynamics at play here.

For her own part, Hadoula has three daughters and two sons. The latter have moved away from the village and do not appear, while the former stay and assist their mother, the eldest being a literal spinster. In addition to her tiring routine of delivering disappointment, Hadoula also has to contend with her own troubles in the form of a vision of her deceased mother (Maria Protoppapa).

First appearing as a silent watcher whose gaze pierces Hadoula as she delivers the bad news to a patient, her mother quickly becomes a recurring presence. The ominous ancestor shows up both in the present as a hissing, taunting reminder of Hadoula’s inability to better the status of her fellow village women and in flashbacks, where young Hadoula (Georgianna Dalara) is pitilessly trained to follow in her mother’s footsteps and assume the role of town midwife. These threads gradually grow in intensity until Hadoula reaches a breaking point, and a series of increasingly implausible events ensue.

Given the blunt title, it may be easy to guess where Hadoula’s thoughts eventually turn, but this progression is dampened by the programmatic nature of Nathena’s approach. There are numerous moments where she is lost in a dream or a memory before suddenly jerking awake, often too clearly delineating the boundaries in a film ostensibly about its main character’s delusions. The society that surrounds her is generally reduced to obvious types — an abusive husband, a blind priest, a drunken son-in-law — which in turn simplify the turmoil that Hadoula faces.

“Murderess” does make good use of two key assets. The first is Karabeti, who ably shoulders the burden of depicting her character’s physical and mental transformation. Already wizened yet still forceful at the outset, her committed portrayal grounds some of the more outlandish swings between self-doubt and fervor. The other is Skiathos itself, with its villages made out of layered stones and built along an extended ridge in the fog, lending an automatic sense of mystery that greatly aids in sustaining the film’s mood.

While “Murderess” is a purposefully cloistered film, the parallels with other societies at other times are immediately apparent far before its conclusion. After the final images, a chiron appears, explaining a specific plot point’s relevance and tying it to a historical and ongoing crisis. The sudden shift in scale feels clumsy at best, especially when the set of circumstances just seen in the film are presented in such extreme, broad strokes. Though “Murderess” is not without its arresting moments, the inflexibility of its approach proves to be a fatal flaw.