We’re unsettled by anyone who kills another human being. The idea of taking a person’s life, to the vast majority of us, is morally revolting. Serial killers scare us worse because of the repetitive act of murder, and, in most cases, the depravity of the lengths to which they go to commit gruesome crimes. Something unsettles us deeply about women serial killers even further. As a society, we know men are more violent, so when a woman kills repetitively or in large numbers it’s a shocking realisation.
Olga Hepnarová was, by definition, a mass murderer. On July 10th, 1973, Olga rented a truck and circled a tram stop known to be busy. When she saw enough people waiting for the streetcar, she drove onto the sidewalk and right through the crowd. She killed eight people in total – three on the scene, two died in hospital later that day, and three others died days afterwards – and injured another twelve. When police arrested her she plainly stated a desire to kill as many people as possible with no regret for the killings. On March 12th, 1975, Olga was executed by short-drop hanging at Pankrác prison in Prague— at only twenty three years old, she was the last woman executed in Czechoslovakia.
From the age of thirteen, Olga suffered from a deep depression. She attempted suicide, spent a year in a psychiatric ward, and the rest of her life was marked by a hatred for the world in general, from her family to society. She felt mistreated by everyone, like just being alive was offensive to others. The 2016 film I, Olga Hepnarová by directors and co-writers Petr Kazda and Tomás Weinreb is a devastating and raw character study focused on this troubled inner life of the mass murderer, played by actress Michalina Olszanska. Kazda and Weinreb opt for no sensationalism. Instead they offer a humanistic approach to the life of an abused, damaged, and tragic woman, whose actions were despicable, but whose existence was torturous.
The film opens with Olga’s suicide attempt at thirteen. She was bullied at school, then when she was committed to a hospital after trying to kill herself she was bullied by the girls there, too. We see early on Olga was attracted to girls, though she was also attracted to boys. This alone set her apart from others, particularly since it was the early 1960s at the time. She felt like an outsider amongst people her age and people in general. At home, she was either ignored or abused— the opening suicide scene is so quietly horrifying in its depiction of a compartmentalized home, where young Olga is isolated to the point she nearly took her own life without anybody noticing. This becomes a theme in Olga’s life, which Kazda and Weinreb stress. It’s as if she’s entirely alone, despite her slight connections to other people. She drifts from one sad relationship to the next, and nothing can save her from the despair of existence. The screenplay’s biggest theme is nihilism: no matter what Olga does it means nothing, and she knows this, so she barrels forward toward destruction.
From being a desperately lonely girl she moved into an equally lonely young woman, seeking sexual companionship in other women and older men. One of the only people she genuinely relates to is the significantly older Miroslav (played by Martin Pechlát). Their relationship blossoms because they each see life in similarly nihilistic terms. Like Olga, Miroslav was abused by his parents when he was younger, and this upbringing fostered a ‘do what you please’-type of attitude, unconcerned with the seriousness of life. Although Olga is morbidly serious, she gravitates towards his unconventional perspective, and they find comfort in one another. In fact, he’s the last character she spends time with before she commits the eventual massacre. Their relationship is bittersweet. It’s a genuine emotional connection for Olga. It also precedes her crime in a decidedly negative way. Like everyone else, Miroslav ignores Olga’s obvious signs of derangement. In a scene between the two at a bar, she casually remarks to him in what the audience comes to understand as her perpetually grim tone: “All parents should be executed and all children put in institutions.” In one scene, she breaks the fourth wall to explicitly state her intentions. The audience unwillingly takes the place of the people in Olga’s life as she stares directly at the screen and tells us: “I know I’m a psycho, but an enlightened one. One day you’ll pay for your laughter and my tears.” Olga’s bleak perspective is never taken seriously by anybody around her, only furthering her isolation.
There are several ways Kazda and Weinreb hone in on Olga’s disconnect from the world. One interesting symbol stitched throughout the screenplay is that of smell. At various points, Olga’s told she smells, or her car smells— even the sandwich spread at her apartment stinks. The smell becomes like a metaphor of the rot in her soul spreading out into the world, illustrating the physical pervasiveness of anger and depression, the corporeal manifestation of those ugly feelings. Just as depression manifests in the body from the mind, as does Olga’s nihilism infect the world around her. Later, this manifests itself into her purposeful attempt at murder, at which she succeeds. Her smell, and the smell of everything she touches, is also symbolic of the world being repulsed by her. On an subconscious level, the world is tainted by Olga, and she leaves a smell wherever she goes, like a snail.
It’s noticeable on its own, but another character remarks to Olga in one scene how she never says hello to anybody, not when she’s on the bus or at someone’s home despite the fact she knows people. Olga is presented as ghost-like. She wanders through the lives of others, through acquaintances and close relationships all the same. Her ghostliness comes through in how her lack of greeting others is like her own affirmation that nobody sees her— she is forgotten and uncared for by the world. Olga becomes isolation anthropomorphized in a scene where she sits in a bar, surrounded by people, and everybody around her is enjoying themselves while she sits alone in their midst, not smiling or laughing. It’s as if she’s almost invisible. Her very existence is a visual metaphor of depression and its inescapable desperation. A therapist warns Olga of the dangers in isolating “oneself from a society completely.” Unfortunately for her, and the people she went on to kill, the isolation she experienced was only infinitesimally her own choice. As the screenplay goes deeper into Olga’s private life, it reveals more of the psychology behind her psychopathy.
Olga’s private life provides the film’s narration via her diary. These personal inner thoughts show a descent from a sad girl who wanted to only hurt herself in the beginning to the grown woman whose anger and bitterness literally drive her to hurt, and kill, many others. “People cast me out and now they expect me to come back?” she writes. On one page, she likens herself to being as “impoverished as the worst drug addict” then asks: “But where are my drugs?” This is both a comment again on the physical effects of a mental disorder, and likewise one about a lack of proper medication for those with mental illness, as she can’t even get a doctor to prescribe her pills. It isn’t until she murders eight people that a doctor finally diagnoses her with schizophrenia. The most devastating of her writing is in the final letter she pens before the massacre. She explains her disdain for a society indifferent to the suffering of the vulnerable. The title of the film comes from the final line where she refers to society as a whole in singular person: “I, Olga Hepnarová, the victim of your bestiality, sentence you to death.”
The trial scenes give Olga a chance to confront society through the courtroom. She explains, in great detail, her feelings about the world. She refers to herself, and others who’ve been stepped on repeatedly by society, as “Prügelknabe”— German for ‘whipping boy.’ Stunningly, Olga asks to be sentenced to death. She recognizes her able body and her white skin, as well as the economically privileged background from which she comes. In the screenplay’s most humanistic moment, she stands as an image of all victims, in that she was victimized by her family and the rest of society regardless of privilege, and if a young woman such as Olga – white, healthy, from a family of money – can become a victim, it can happen to anybody. Despite her horrific crime, she comes off like a martyr for the abused and bullied young people of the world, resigning herself to fate and accepting the death penalty with a sense of duty.
In an early scene, a woman scolds Olga: “If I were your mother I would hang you.” This one moment defines Olga’s entire life, as the sad irony is her own mother viewed her with contempt and barely flinched at her teenage suicide attempt. Her life was a dearth of tenderness. She went from a young girl being abused by her father and ignored by her mother, to a grown woman confused about whether she wanted connection to others or isolation from a society that rejected her in every way.
The film’s screenplay is a character study of Olga’s psychopathy and how it formed, illustrating a failure to help her at each level of society. She was cast out emotionally and physically, to the point she lived literally on the periphery of city life in a small hut she called “a symbol of [her] loneliness.” She became a ghost walking amongst the living until she decided to become a real one and took a bunch of other people with her into the grave.
I, Olga Hepnarová is a rare sympathetic portrayal of a mass murderer. Her actions are indefensible and the screenplay never tries to excuse what she did, going so far as to include Olga’s own words from the trial where she takes full responsibility for the killings. The audience can at once see how she fell fatally into psychopathy while also recognizing she was shaped into the human monster she became through her crime. The ultimate message of the film is that it’s never so easy to say a person is pure evil because they commit horrible acts of violence. Without excusing Olga the film shows how deeply wounded she was, conjuring sympathy in the audience despite all odds in the face of her taking the lives of eight innocent people.
 exhibits the untreated psychopathy that lead Olga Hepnarová to murder eight people with her truck.){kind=link}