A period piece set in eighteenth-century Scotland, against a backdrop of religious conflicts that are tearing the country apart, The Memoirs of a Sinner is one of Has's most sumptuous productions, bravura filmmaking in the tradition of The Saragossa Manuscript. Indeed, some of that film's baroque thrills lurk in this film as well-ghosts, graveyards, candles, spider webs, and the hidden libertine soul of man. The film's subject is no less than the dualism of the soul, the essence of good and evil. The story is of a young man whose memories, recounted after death, tell of an experimental life. His wager is that bad deeds are not an obstacle to ultimate redemption. Thus he sinks in sin, or rather, his evil double does so, backing himself up with philosophy all along the way.