Based on a story by Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata fashions its lurid tale of upper-crust love crimes into a vividly Expressionist exercise in set design and cinematic excess. Helmed by the great director Machatý (Erotikon) after his return from Hollywood, the film opens on a train, where the wild-eyed Pozdnyshev launches into a confessional to his fellow travelers. Moving from his debauched youth of skirt-chasing and drinking (he describes himself as “up to my head in filth”), this maniacal rider maps out his loveless marriage to Natasha, a relationship marked by jealousy and the inevitable mustachioed rival, Trukhachevsky, a “virtuoso at violin . . . and love.” Cutting between Pozdnyshev's train-bound narration and a wildly stylized re-creation of the aristocratic pleasure-domes he fell from, The Kreutzer Sonata engagingly marries the melodrama of Hollywood with a specifically Slavic concern for madness, alienation, and the hypocrisy of the elite.