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Martha's (Margit Carstensen) father drops dead, then she's faced with a horrible marriage of abuse and Gaslight-class torture. Fassbinder offers up an extremely bleak work here, even for him, but ultimately the film works mainly as the diatribe against marriage that it is. The rail-thin and ghost-pale Carstensen doesn't really evoke sympathy; she's too freaking scary to make us wish for a happy ending.
