Princess

Using stylized animation and a small amount of grainy video, this unsettling revenge melodrama from Danish writer-director Anders Morgenthaler has as its avenging angel a cleric named August who is obsessed with forcing the porno bigwigs who bankrolled his late sister Christina's career as an adult-film star (known as “The Princess”) to destroy all the material featuring her, while also caring for her five-year-old daughter. The clergyman is an expert fighter, as adept with his fists as with a gun, and when Christina's employers resist his demands, he deals with them in extraordinarily brutal and bloody fashion. That aspect of the film is troubling enough, but even more so is the characterization of the little girl, whose bordello upbringing has sexualized her to an unseemly degree and left her with a tendency to use her sweet voice to pipe out the foulest of language. (A scene in which her uncle encourages her to take a crowbar to the genitals of man who once abused her is especially grotesque.) The live-action scenes consist of brief porn clips and flashbacks showing the dead sister and the boyfriend who got her into the porno trade—August's ultimate target. While the animation in Princess is visually arresting, its mixture of extreme violence and explicit sexuality is definitely unpleasant, particularly in a film that's apparently meant to condemn pornography. Optional. (F. Swietek)