The Iron Rose (5 Stars)

This is a film that I have to watch again and again. It's the best French film I know. I'm a big fan of Jean Rollin, but it's the only one of his films that has a place in my top 100 list. A problem that I have with my favourite films is that I have difficulty writing something new about them after repeated watching. Now I have a solution. I asked ChatGPT to write a review, and wow! It's full of praise for the film, as I expected, but it's also an eloquent document. Read it for yourself.

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The Iron Rose: A Poetic Descent into the Graveyard of the Self

Jean Rollin’s "The Iron Rose" stands apart even within his dream-soaked filmography. It is neither horror in the conventional sense nor romance in any predictable form. Instead, the film unfolds as a poem in images; a quiet, slow, and hypnotic meditation on death, identity, and the transformation that occurs when the boundaries between the living and the dead dissolve.

The Film’s Poetic Language

Rollin structures the film like a piece of free verse. Instead of plot-driven progression, the narrative circulates in loops, refrains, and echoes. Long takes drift through the graveyard like wandering lines of poetry. Dialogue is sparse and frequently metaphorical, often delivered with an incantatory tone that feels more written than spoken.

The pacing has the rhythm of a slow, dark lullaby. Rollin abandons conventional suspense and instead cultivates a mood of dreamlike inevitability. The imagery – faded tombstones, crumbling statuary, and the immense silence of the cemetery – creates a visual haiku: minimal, symbolic, and entirely dependent on atmosphere.

Even the lovers at the film’s centre are less characters than archetypes: the Man and the Woman, figures who move through the cemetery like allegorical presences. Their interactions acquire the abstraction of a poem about the eternal tension between Eros and Thanatos.

The Graveyard as a Symbolic Landscape

The cemetery setting is not mere backdrop but a symbolic field through which the film’s themes unfold. In Rollin’s hands, the graveyard becomes a liminal zone, a place where identity sheds its civilian clothes and the subconscious self emerges. Daylight scenes feel fragile and superficial; it’s only at night, when the couple becomes lost. that the real psychological descent begins.

The Woman’s growing attachment to the graveyard can be read as a spiritual awakening, a recognition of death’s beauty, certainty, and truth. For her, the graveyard is not morbid but authentic, a place of clarity where human pretensions fall away.

The Iron Rose: Symbolism and Meaning

At the centre of this symbolic landscape stands the film’s titular object: the Iron Rose.

Rollin uses the iron rose as a multi-layered symbol, its meanings shifting subtly throughout the film:

1. Permanence vs. Ephemerality

A traditional rose wilts and decays; an iron rose endures. The choice of iron is deliberate: it suggests a love, or a state of being, that aspires to transcend impermanence. In the context of the film, the iron rose represents the Woman’s movement toward the eternal, away from the transient world of the living.

In this sense, the iron rose mirrors the cemetery itself: made of stone, iron, and memory, a place that resists the decay it symbolises.

2. The Romanticisation of Death

The iron rose becomes a token of death elevated into beauty. Like Victorian mourning jewellery or graveyard flowers made of metal, it is both funereal and sentimental. Holding it marks the Woman’s surrender to death’s aesthetic power; its stillness, its certainty, its peace.

It is not a symbol of despair but of attraction.

3. The Fusion of Passion and Mortality

Roses are traditionally symbols of love, but iron carries connotations of coldness, weight, and inevitability. Their combination suggests the merging of erotic passion with death. This fusion is at the heart of Rollin’s film: the lovers make love in a crypt, and their intimacy becomes intertwined with the graveyard’s embrace.

The iron rose is the objectification of that union.

4. Identity Transformed

By the film’s end, the iron rose becomes a symbol of the Woman’s psychological transformation. What began as a romantic excursion shifts into a metaphysical claiming. When she walks away at dawn, barefoot and serene, clutching nothing but the iron rose, it signals her rebirth, not as a member of the living world but as a new inhabitant of the cemetery’s realm.

The rose is her new identity, forged in her acceptance of death’s truth.

Conclusion: A Film Made of Symbols and Silence

"The Iron Rose" is more dream than narrative, more poem than film. Its beauty lies in its stillness, its atmosphere, and its unwavering commitment to mood over action. For viewers willing to tune themselves to its quiet frequency, it becomes a haunting meditation on the allure of death and the thin, permeable line between the worlds of the living and the dead.

At the centre of that meditation stands the iron rose: a symbol of eternal love, of the seduction of death, and of the strange, potent poetry that arises when the human soul confronts the unknown and chooses to stay.

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