Still from Miro Remo, Better Go Mad in the Wild, 2025.
In a spa town in west Bohemia, Czech Republic, a sense of eerie claustrophobia creeps in quickly. Amid looming hills, pastel art-nouveau facades are dotted with signs advertising flats for sale. My hotel room on the outskirts of town is sandwiched between a Thai massage parlor and a parking lot. In the entrance hall, a paternal Franz Joseph I watches from a gilded frame, next to a baroque composition of chubby cherubs.
Since the nineteenth century, high society has flocked to Karlovy Vary, then called Karlsbad, to bathe in the healing waters of its thermal springs. Since 1949—Czechoslovak times—the town has hosted one of Europe’s most prestigious film festivals. In the same year, Prague-born communist journalist Egon Erwin Kisch published his investigation Karl Marx in Karlsbad, which has recently been translated into English.1
Marx sought respite in Karlovy Vary, among Europe’s bourgeois, though he tried to be incognito. Recovering from burnout after editing the French translation of Capital, Marx was urged by Friedrich Engels to take the Czech cure. Engels gave his overworked comrade forty pounds sterling to cover his travel expenses to the salty springs.2
Marx spent three summers in Karlsbad, in 1874, 1875, and 1876, staying with his Austrian physician, Dr. Fleckles. He was accompanied by his seriously ill daughter Eleanor, known as “Tussy,” whose chain-smoking shocked the other patients. Due to his political notoriety, Marx kept a low profile, registering as Charles Marx, a “private gentleman” from London.3
On September 1, 1874, Marx wrote to “Fred” Engels: “Yesterday, however, I was denounced … in the Viennese gossip magazine Sprudel (a spa journal), along with the Polish patriot Count Plater (a good Catholic, liberal aristocrat), who was declared to be ‘leader of the Russian nihilists.’”4
As Kisch’s investigation reveals, the spa gossip was spread by none other than the son of Marx’s trusted doctor. The summer after, nursing his daily glasses of mineral water and Pilsen beer, Marx confessed that “the absence of my personal physician … has had a very healing effect on me.”5
Today, Karlovy Vary holds the last remaining Marx statue in the Czech Republic, a country where the legacy of state socialism is being erased. This year, the Czech Chamber of Deputies approved an amendment to the Criminal Code that criminalizes the promotion of communism. The revised law might impose prison sentences for the public display of the hammer and sickle or the promotion of Marxist ideology.
The 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, held in the Hotel Thermal, an impressive brutalist complex from the 1960s, also grapples with the complex aftermath of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. Its program centers around dark themes—war, violence, and ecological disaster—while celebrating moments of resilience and resistance.
War does not end when the last soldier leaves. Dmytro Hreshko’s visually stunning eco-drama Divia (2025) documents the environmental impact of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Screened in the Crystal Globe Competition, the film was presented by its producers, since the director is now serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Filmed over three years, Divia is a captivating meditation on war’s toll on nature, set to an experimental score by Sam Slater, without any dialogue or narration.
Divia documents the ecocide unfolding across Ukraine as a result of the Russian invasion. It portrays war as a string of biblical plagues: poisoned rivers, scorched fields, craters carved into the soil, animals dead in the wreckage. According to the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group, the war in Ukraine, an industrialized country with nuclear facilities, has triggered an environmental catastrophe with both immediate and long-term consequences.6
Hreshko’s camera lingers on burnt soil, flooded towns, and the humans returning to the ruins. Ukrainian workmen clear mines, dive into murky waters, take ecological samples, and search for missing bodies. Ukraine’s endangered species and protected natural sites have suffered irreparable damage since February 2022. War is an assault not just on people, but on life itself.
In Askania-Nova, Europe’s largest untouched steppe, Russian forces dug trenches, hunted wild animals, and drove tanks through the fragile grasslands. The recent occupation of coal mines poses a serious risk of polluting groundwater. Oil spills from Russian tankers have leaked into the Black Sea, while the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in 2023, under Russian occupation, unleashed flooding in southern Ukraine, a central episode in Divia.
Hreshko decided to make a highly aestheticized film, with pretty aerial shots zooming in on forests reduced to ash and fields strewn with shrapnel. The devastated landscape is given a sublime beauty. Combined with Slater’s meditative soundtrack, the sleek footage creates a disorienting effect on the viewer, raising unsettling questions: Does war destroy nature or allow it to regrow? Are warring humans a disruptive force in the natural world, or is war itself a natural cycle? In the end, the film resists a clear message.
A straightforward reading of the film is that it’s a mournful elegy for ecocide. Yet visually, Divia is more ambivalent. Grass sprouts through discarded military debris; wildflowers reclaim trenches; nature appears to break free from the grip of human civilization. The film suggests, however unwittingly, that human extinction could lead to ecological rebirth. Amplified by the immersive sound design, it almost seems as if war is a natural force restoring ecological balance. Life has vanished, yet returns in other forms. The film’s ambiguity is captured in its title: Divia is the Slavic fertility goddess associated with nature, water, and the moon. According to James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Divia is the goddess of spring. Whether the film’s title refers to Ukraine’s forests as Mother Nature, or to the life-giving soil of Slavic mythology, is unclear. What’s certain is that the ecosystem in Divia is enchanted by pagan mythology and animism. In Slavic folklore, the devony are female mountain demons that live in caves, spin threads, and are connected to Divia.
Demonic forces and an enchanted Central European landscape also set the stage for Hungarian auteur Bence Fliegauf’s low-budget docu-fiction Jimmy Jaguar (2025), which had its world premiere in Karlovy Vary. The film opens with police footage of Seed, a mechanic, who is interrogated after he and the eccentric poet Marci Balfi abducted and tortured an old man. Both men claim they have never met before and were possessed, acting under the command of a demon named Jimmy Jaguar, also known as Jagu. Further investigation reveals that their victim was a Serbian war criminal who was hiding out in the Hungarian countryside. Restaging the Serbian’s own brutal crime from the Yugoslav wars, the mechanic and the poet tie up his body in plastic and send him on a boat down a river.
Structured as an episodic investigation, Jimmy Jaguar is driven by a wonderfully unhinged logic, blending mockumentary, camp folk horror, home video, and found footage. Across Hungary’s vast plains, loosely connected events and characters are stitched together by the absent presence of Jagu, a dark demon drifting from soul to soul. Neither good nor evil, Jagu is demonic in the Greek sense, pointing to the concept of δαíμων as a divine spirit, character, or personality, linked to the idea of a soul.
A local TV crew sets out to piece together the puzzle of the Jagu cult. Confessional interviews with Jagu’s “hosts,” including a policewoman, an anthropologist, a psychiatrist, and Gen Z girls caught in a viral social media episode, reveal something between collective psychosis and a folk cult. In one scene, an entire animal shelter is mysteriously emptied, its creatures set loose into the wild by the demon himself.
Meanwhile, the mad poet becomes the guru of an entire Jagu commune, speaking in tongues and impregnating women with the demon’s semen. Fliegauf’s references range from the Manson Family to Saint Vitus’ dance, the “dancing mania” (a term from Paracelsus) that swept through medieval Europe. Shifting from psychological horror to a sociopolitical investigation of Hungarian society, Jimmy Jaguar culminates in a final mission that takes the demon’s devotees to a luxurious villa on Lake Balaton. Fliegauf’s film is not a crowd-pleaser—dozens walked out of the opulent screening room—but its intensity and play with folk horror is captivating.
The demonic doesn’t stop with Jagu. It also drives Kazakh enfant terrible Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Cadet (2024), screened in the festival’s Afterhours section. In Yerzhanov’s universe, the demon is the lingering ghost of the Stalinist purges, still haunting the present.
Set in an eerie military school that evokes Yerzhanov’s hostage drama Assault (2022), Cadet blends horror with magical realism. It is centered on Serik, a pupil with delicate features and an emo haircut. His single mother, Alina, arrives at the elite military academy to teach history and enrolls Serik as a cadet. In the school’s hyper-masculine environment, he quickly becomes the target of bullying. Increasingly drawn into the cult of violence, Serik brings home birds he has tortured. What follows is even more disturbing.
When a student turns up dead in savage circumstances, a local investigator—a classic Yerzhanov antihero, world weary and prone to swearing—is called to the military school to uncover the truth. Whether murder or suicide, he traces the crime back to Serik, who is possessed by the ghosts of cadets killed during the Stalinist purges. Another cultish reference suggested by Serik’s violent rampage is Nergal, the Mesopotamian god of war and death. Yerzhanov’s fusion of horror and magical realism builds suspense early on, but the final hour, culminating in a macabre basement showdown with the ghosts, is over the top.
Cadet is a disturbing meditation on the Russian war in Ukraine, focusing on masculinity and possession by evil. At the military academy, Serik learns that in order to survive, one must become a killer—a bleak glimpse into contemporary Russian society, brutalized by war and the enduring shadow of Stalinism. Yerzhanov’s film turns the Stalinist purges into a cyclical nightmare: every fourteen years, from 1938 to 2022, the dead cadets rise and trigger a bloodbath, acting through the emo kid whose incessant pencil-clicking drives others to suicide.
Ultimately, the Karlovy Vary festival is a celebration of Czech cinema, with retrospectives of classic films and spotlights on emerging talent. Michael Douglas presented a restoration of Miloš Forman’s 1975 landmark One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Among the recent Czech films screened in Karlovy Vary, Terézia Halamová’s Dog and Wolf (2025) stands out. It’s a gritty portrait of Rudo, a male stripper who performs coked-up in a skintight cowboy outfit and is haunted by memories of his ex-girlfriend. Anything can happen in the hour between dog and wolf, when the night is not quite over and the day has yet to begin. Halamová’s short is confident and stylistically seductive, a unique take on male loneliness and desire, with Ulrich Seidl vibes.
One of Rudo’s jobs takes him to the dull Czech countryside—also the backdrop of Miro Remo’s Better Go Mad in the Wild (2025), which won the festival’s Grand Prix in the Crystal Globe Competition. The Slovak director’s latest drama is a wild journey into the secluded lives of identical twin hermits, Ondřej and František Klišík, who inhabit a dilapidated farm in Šumava, in the middle of the Bohemian Forest. Like Divia and Jimmy Jaguar, the film draws its energy from the Central European countryside, an enchanted landscape haunted by its past. Better Go Mad in the Wild is a deeply funny Czech epic set to the sound of composer Bedřich Smetana’s Vltava, a local anthem.
The opening shot lingers over a tree, where one of the twins sits singing. Like his brother he has a wild beard, unkempt clothes, and a fondness for alcohol. Their story unfolds as a beautifully shot meditation on life and death. The pair live like aging hippies: wandering naked, bathing in the forest, smoking joints in the sun. Their escapism is bound up with their deep connection to nature and to their animals.
The film is based on the book of the same name by Aleš Palán and Jan Šibík, which features interviews with people living permanently outside civilization, including the Šumava twins. The director contacted the authors and they “brought me into their world,” he said. “I fell in love with them and with their environment. I was fascinated by everything magical and enchantingly unusual.”7 The eccentric twins live in solitude in the forest where they have spent their entire lives.
We learn about their past: František lost his arm in a sawmill accident, still drunk from the night before. Drunkards and dreamers, the brothers lie on the grass watching clouds drift by and reciting poems about death that they invent on the spot. When slaughtering a chicken, one mutters: “You’re in another world now.” Among their megalomaniacal projects is a Renaissance-inspired flying machine that never quite takes off.
Despite its dark moments, the film remains lighthearted, with the twins constantly bickering like a cantankerous couple. Remo employs surreal imagery and magical realism, including a cow that suddenly speaks and one of the twins lying in a bed of cabbages. By using an old-fashioned narrative style, Remo crafts the story of the twins into a modern fairy tale. One recurring motif is mirrors, evoking the magical world of Alice in Wonderland, with its twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The festival jury stated that “in a world as mad as ours,” the Klišík twins “actually might be the sanest people on earth.”8
In Better Go Mad in the Wild, the personal becomes political when we learn that the brothers were part of the Šumava underground, a nonviolent anti-communist resistance that paved the way for the 1989 Velvet Revolution. They proudly fly a makeshift Ukrainian flag in their garden and reject normal society: “Fuck the world!”
The film portrays twinship as cabin fever, the brothers living both against each other and through each other. One twin is a dreamer and fool who is trying to build a perpetuum mobile; the other writes poetry. Though an antagonistic pair, their identities merge. The film draws on the myth of twinship, evoking the duality of Cain and Abel: “We’re both Abel.” Are these bickering twins also a metaphor for the Czech and Slovak republics, more than three decades after the fall of communism?
From Karlovy Vary, Marx wrote to Engels: “The surroundings here are very pretty, and one cannot have enough of roaming these wooded granite hills. But no birds nest in these woods. The birds are healthy and are not fond of mineral vapors.” It was later revealed that the absence of birds was not due to the mineral vapors, but to profit-driven human alterations to the environment.9 The spa town’s eerie isolation makes its film festival an ideal stage for haunting demons, deep traumas, and the darker truths lurking beneath the pastel-colored surface.
Notes
1
Egon Erwin Kisch, Karl Marx in Karlsbad (Rab Rab Press, 2025).
2
Kisch, Karl Marx in Karlsbad, 51.
3
Kisch, Karl Marx in Karlsbad, 30.
4
Kisch, Karl Marx in Karlsbad, 30.
5
Kisch, Karl Marx in Karlsbad, 39.
6
See →.
7
Marta Balaga, “Miro Remo’s ‘Better Go Mad in the Wild’ Triumphs at Karlovy Vary as Stellan Skarsgard Picks Up Crystal Globe,” Variety, July 12, 2025 →.
8
Balaga, “Miro Remo’s ‘Better Go Mad in the Wild.’”
9
Kisch, Karl Marx in Karlsbad, 30, 77.
