Review of Rötmånad (1970)
A barber’s wife has been missing for five years, but suddenly returns to her inept husband and flowering daughter in their poorly maintained house in an archipelago. The wife has been transformed in her unexplained absence and now does anything for money. She starts a small brothel in the boathouse and has the barber serve the drinks.
A black comedy portraying the sudden revelation of nihilistic organized criminality in a landscape of mythic innocence. Unusually for films with this motif, such as Blue Velvet (1986) or Fargo (1996), the crime here isn’t murder.
Thin, relatively banal, and very probably not the world’s first example of the interesting theme. The title refers to a month of warm weather (“dog days”) evident in food spoilage.