In Rainer Werner Fassbinder's work, the vertigo of control often takes the form of a rotation. A merry-go-round, a carousel of sadism, a 360-degree pan that envelops his characters in a circular prison of glances and objects. In Martha, this movement, orchestrated by the genius of Michael Ballhaus behind the camera, is not a simple stylistic quirk; it is the very thesis of the film, the blueprint of the domestic hell that is about to unfold. When Martha Heyer (a magnificent Margit Carstensen, a porcelain mask ready to crack) meets Helmut Salomon (Karlheinz Böhm, whose metamorphosis from the angelic emperor of Sissi to this engineer of cruelty is one of the most chilling counterpoints in the history of cinema) in Rome, the camera revolves around them, isolating them from the world, consecrating them to a destiny that is already written in the perfect circle of its trajectory. It is a courtship that is already a capture, a waltz that is already a noose.

Fassbinder, alchemist of melodrama, takes his tutelary deity, Douglas Sirk, and subjects him to a process of ruthless vivisection. If in films such as Second Love or Like Leaves in the Wind the gilded cage of the bourgeoisie was photographed in garish Technicolor to expose its sentimental hypocrisy, in Martha the same chromatic hypertrophy becomes an instrument of psychological torture. The saturated colors, impeccable clothes, and luxurious, suffocating bourgeois interiors no longer hide a romantic unhappiness; they actively produce it. Fassbinder does not merely quote Sirk: he pushes him to his extreme, logical consequences. He empties the melodrama of any possible catharsis, of any liberating tears, and leaves us with the bare, creaking machinery of power. Helmut's villa is not a provincial home where an impossible love is consummated; it is the laboratory of a unilateral sadomasochistic experiment, a Bluebeard's castle where the forbidden rooms contain not corpses but rules.

The relationship between Martha and Helmut is an almost clinical examination of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, but transposed into a context of disconcerting everyday banality. Helmut is not a monster from a Gothic novel; he is a civil engineer, a man obsessed with logic, statistics, and efficiency. His cruelty is not passionate, but methodical, almost bureaucratic. He is an architect of submission. His rules are as absurd as they are ironclad: Martha must not read her beloved books because they ‘tire her mind’, she must listen to a specific song because he has chosen it for her, she must breathe in a certain way, she must fear heights because his statistics manual has decided so. It is a total colonization of being, a military occupation of psychic space. In this, the film is closer to Kafka than to De Sade. Martha is not trapped in a vortex of erotic perversions, but in a process whose charges she is unaware of, in a castle whose laws she does not understand. Her guilt is her very existence, her individuality, which Helmut is committed to dismantling piece by piece with the precision of a demolition man.

Karlheinz Böhm's performance is crucial. The actor, aware of his iconic past as the clean-cut face of post-war German cinema, uses his own image to create a frightening short circuit. His smile is a grimace of superiority, his calmness a latent threat. He is the perfect embodiment of the Germany of the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, which under a facade of order, prosperity, and rationality concealed the authoritarian impulses and violence of the recent past that had never been completely suppressed. Helmut, with his blind faith in technology and control, is the ghost of an entire nation, the product of a society that has replaced ethics with procedure, morality with norms. His home, a triumph of 1970s design, thus becomes a microcosm of this new Germany: impeccable, functional, sterile, and totally devoid of humanity.

But Fassbinder's genius, and the reason why Martha is such a disturbing work, lies in the ambiguity of Martha's role. She is not simply a passive victim. Her submission has deeper roots. Fassbinder presents her from the outset as a fragile, neurotic woman, raised in the shadow of an oppressive father and a repressive culture. There is a kind of predisposition to subjugation in her, a latent masochism that Helmut, with the instinct of a predator, recognizes and exploits. The famous scene on the roller coaster, where her terror is mixed with a strange form of erotic excitement, is emblematic. Fear and desire, submission and a perverse form of security merge into an inextricable knot. She does not desire pain, but perhaps she desires an end to uncertainty, liberation from the terrible fatigue of freedom and choice. In a world that terrifies her, Helmut's tyranny paradoxically offers her structure and order. It is a terrifying idea that anticipates works such as Haneke's The Piano Teacher by decades, where perversion is the only possible emotional grammar for damaged souls.

Fassbinder's direction is a masterclass in cinema. The camera does not merely record the action, but comments on it, judges it, imprisons it. Ballhaus's fluid and complex movements create a sense of omniscient claustrophobia. Mirrors and reflective surfaces are omnipresent, fragmenting Martha's identity, constantly showing her under the gaze of someone else (Helmut, the camera, us). Shots through doors and windows (another homage to Sirk, but also to Hitchcock) constantly box her in frames within the frame, emphasizing her condition as a recluse. It is an exaggerated formalism that is never gratuitous: form is content. The film's aesthetics are its ethics, or rather, its absence.

If one were to look for a contemporary descendant of the spirit of Martha, one might find it, indirectly, in Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread. There, too, a relationship is a battlefield for control, a closed system of rules and rituals, where love is indistinguishable from dependence and oppression. But where Anderson leaves a glimmer of hope for a perverse negotiation of power, a toxic but functional balance, Fassbinder closes every door. The ending of Martha is one of absolute nihilism, of a logical cruelty that leaves you breathless. After a desperate attempt to escape, a car accident leaves her paralyzed from the waist down. Now she is completely dependent on Helmut. Her dream of liberation has turned into her ultimate condemnation. Helmut, with a seraphic smile, can finally take care of her, possess her totally, without any resistance. His plan is accomplished. The circle is closed, the rotation is complete. And all that remains for us is the ringing in our ears, the reverberation of a cold and perfect masterpiece, a relentless treatise on the silent brutality that hides behind the wallpaper of genteel living rooms.