Zabranjena ljubav The Forbidden Love (2009) dir, Momčilo Preradović ★★½

Review by Fernando Figueroa

in

A chilling case of necrophilia that is not immediately apparent because Uros Stojkovic, the medical student who has just started working at the morgue, seems perfectly normal and peaceful. He is welcomed with great fanfare by Radmila, the manager of the morgue. However, things start to seem strange when, in his spare time, he leaves the public library and approaches the young Danilovic Petar, who immediately rejects him because she is grieving the loss of the love of her life. The days pass and Uros befriends Dejan, his colleague on shift, and soon the body of the woman he liked and tried unsuccessfully to date arrives at the morgue. From here, and taking into account Uros’ flashbacks to when he was a child and couldn’t get over the death of his pet, it becomes predictable what will follow. He removes the corpse of the suicide victim, but not before unzipping her, even though she is restrained there. He takes the body to his flat and lives with her as if she were alive, surrounding her with stuffed animals and attention, and continues to work his shifts. But unfortunately for him, the young woman’s father, Mirko Boskovic, demands to identify the body and asks Uros to wait with the corpse while he makes arrangements. Uros takes advantage of this to steal the body.

As Ek’s father insists on claiming his daughter’s body to give her a proper burial, Uros obtains Eutamina from a drug dealer and, under the pretext of showing the body to the old man, stabs him with the syringe, killing him instantly. He thought that by eliminating the father, his problems were over, but instead of disposing of the father’s body in the same way, he reported it to the police and also did not count on the ‘deadly rash’ mentioned in the film, which is not a mental disorder, but a real dermatological condition of infectious origin that occurs in people who have had close contact with the pathogens of a corpse.

Going after Eugarin’s tablets was useless, and the last straw was when he used the free tickets to the nightclub given to him by Dejan, where he met the young Lepenovic, with whom he had sex and began a romantic relationship, but he infected her with pathogenic dermatitis, and when she sought medical attention, she served as an infectious biological marker to locate the young medical student and hold him responsible.

The compulsive need to keep the corpse with him, despite the professional and legal risks, demonstrates obsessive behaviour related to control and preservation of the object of his obsession. For example, Borderline Personality Disorder is evident when he tells her, ‘I cheated on you,’ and his decision to ‘end this torture’ are unambiguous, revealing his emotional instability, chaotic interpersonal relationships, and self-destructive behaviours characteristic of this disorder.


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