The Saragossa Manuscript

In the midst of a battle in the Napoleonic Wars two opposing soldiers find and begin to read a manuscript together. It purports to be an account by a Walloon officer named Alfonso Van Worden of the strange things that happened to him on a journey through the Spanish mountains a generation before.

The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), directed by Wojceich Has, recreates the hallucinogenic storytelling of Jan Potocki's 1815 novel. The first part is filled with Muslim maidens, underground harems, torture chambers, magic potions and so many skulls that the characters trip over them. Recurring dreams echo and mirror each other until it is difficult to sort fantasy from reality. In the second part, stories of love and infidelity are recounted in a story-within-a-story structure so complex that one character is driven to shout: "It's enough to drive you crazy!"

In this beautifully restored film, costume drama becomes surrealist fantasy. Downton Abbey this is not. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]