01
Safe
Why this pick
Its immaculate suburban surfaces conceal a steadily escalating nightmare of alienation. Like Martha, it turns bourgeois domestic order into an eerily clinical trap around a vulnerable woman.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1974 1h 56m DEU
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
Martha
ThrillerDrama
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved Martha, try these.
01
02
Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
Why this pick
A rigorously controlled portrait of routine and confinement, using repetition and precise framing to make ordinary domestic space feel increasingly oppressive and psychologically charged.
03
Queen of Diamonds
Why this pick
This spare, highly composed study of a woman moving through hostile everyday spaces shares Martha’s estrangement, severe visual design, and sense that social environments can quietly become prisons.
04
The Housemaid
Why this pick
A sharply stylised domestic thriller in which a household’s apparent respectability turns feverish and dangerous. Its bold melodrama and architectural tension strongly suit Fassbinder’s sinister social worlds.
05
La Cérémonie
Why this pick
Chabrol’s cool, exacting view of class performance and repression builds menace through small humiliations and controlled surfaces, with the same pitiless attention to bourgeois cruelty.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
Martha Heyer, a virginal 31-year-old librarian, is on vacation in Rome with her domineering unloving father, a fastidious man who refuses to be touched. At their first stop while touring the city, the Spanish Steps, he suffers a heart attack and dies. Martha soon discovers that her purse, containing all of her money, has been stolen in the confusion. She reaches for help at the German embassy and phones her mother giving her the bad news. Leaving the embassy, Martha crosses the path of a gentleman, who catches her eye – and she his. They are mutually mesmerized but keep going their own ways.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Karlheinz Böhm
Helmut
Barbara Valentin
Marianne
Adrian Hoven
Vater
Kurt Raab
Lilo Pempeit
Margit Carstensen
Martha
Günter Lamprecht
Dr. Salomon
Rudolf Lenz
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