Leticia Faces The Mad Monk

Maleficarum Monxa Mala opens with Barbara confiding to Martina: “it’s been more than a month since...” Martina is not surprised, there are no secrets for her in the confined world they inhabit, the dungeons of the old Holy Office better known as the Inquisition. Martina warns Barbara to keep her secret and tells her that she can help her with ‘that problem’.

Then Leticia enters the film. She is dragged to the dungeon, stripped to the waist, her wrists tied together, yanked up above her head and attached to a wooden post. She’s put there there to atone for organizing a paga feast at her monastery and other transgressions. Agustinus, the Monk, sits across her with two novices, one at each side, kneeling next to him: Barbara, the monk’s favorite, and Julia, Leticia’s friend, who took part of the pagan feast. Julia awaits her turn to face punishment.

Lucrecia, the enforcer, is behind Leticia, whip in hand. She’s in charge of flogging the rebellious novice without mercy while Agustinus justifies such harsh treatment. As the lashes fall on her back, Leticia does not submit humbly to her punishment, she defies and contradicts the Monk and with each sentence she utters, her chastising increases.

Leticia’s punishment is just the beginning. Her defiance breaks the peace of the Holy Office and pushes Agustinus over the edge, an edge where the self imposed limits, which are few, are broken and there’s nothing to stop him from imposing hell on his novices.

Maleficarum Monxa Mala is a film that begins with torture and it does not stop until the very cruel and dramatic end. One after the other, the novices fall out from the Mad Monk’s grace, and each faces the terrible torments of the inquisition.