Morgiana

• Morgiana adapts Alexander Grin's 1929 novel 'Jessie and Morgiana.' Herz renamed the Russian author's sisters Klára and Viktoria and handed the title name to a Siamese cat—the whole film is named after the villain's pet, whose warped point-of-view shots cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera captured with perspective-distorting wide-angle lenses.
• The film was produced during the final years of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and its release coincided with the post-1968 normalization period that effectively shuttered the creative freedom Herz's peers had enjoyed earlier in the decade.
• Iva Janžurová plays both sisters, and Herz originally intended the ending to reveal that Klára and Viktoria were one woman—a schizophrenia twist the Czechoslovak authorities refused to let him film. The split-personality reading survives only as subtext, and Herz later shrugged the whole picture off as an 'exercise.'
• Herz trained as a puppeteer at Prague's DAMU (1954-1958) rather than the FAMU film school that minted the Czech New Wave—a gap he said left him feeling like an outsider to the movement. His puppetry classmate was Jan Švankmajer, born the same day of the same year.
• Far from ignored abroad, Morgiana won the Gold Hugo—the top prize at the 1972 Chicago International Film Festival. It was still hard to actually see for decades, until UK label Second Run issued a DVD in 2010 and later a Blu-ray from Czech National Film Archive materials, with Severin Films adding a separate 2K restoration.
• English director Peter Strickland has named Morgiana a direct influence on The Duke of Burgundy (2014), admitting the trunk-discovery scene in his film is lifted straight from Morgiana's basement scene—Herz's camp Gothic decadence fueling the theatrics he was after.

The two sisters aren't siblings at all—they're a single woman split into two bodies, one embodying appetite and the other embodying punishment. Viktoria's poisoning of Klára is self-destruction performed as murder, which explains why Klára won't die: you can't kill the part of yourself that's doing the killing. And here's the kicker—that's not fan headcanon, that's the ending Herz wanted before the authorities forbade it.

The film's color coding tells the real story. Klára exists in warm amber, Viktoria in diseased green. But as the poisoning progresses, Klára's palette sickens toward Viktoria's tones while Viktoria's scenes grow warmer. They're trading places—Viktoria isn't murdering her sister, she's becoming her, and the poison is just the mechanism of identity transfer.

Morgiana—the cat, the name, the lurking presence—is the film's true protagonist and the sisters are its prey. Herz trained as a puppeteer, and the film frames both women as operated figures. The cat watches from elevated positions, always at frame edges, always judging. The poison isn't Viktoria's revenge; it's Morgiana's ritual, and the sisters are just the ingredients.

Two sisters share a face and a surname, but only one inherited the family fortune. Klára lords over the estate while Viktoria stews in a seaside lodge with her cat Morgiana, poisoning herself with resentment until the idea of poisoning Klára becomes the only idea worth having. A slow-acting poison, untraceable and patient—Viktoria is patient too. She watches her sister hallucinate, weaken, burn with a thirst nothing quenches, and still the woman refuses to die. Herz mounts this Gothic grudge match in fevered amber and sickly green, half of it seen through the cat's warped eye, and the question stops being whether Klára survives. It's whether Viktoria can survive surviving her—because the woman who sold the poison knows exactly what she sold, and blackmail works faster than any drug.