Amok

Year: 1934

Runtime: 92 mins

Language: French

Director: Fyodor Otsep

Drama

Dr. Holk lives a solitary, alcohol‑fueled existence in a remote Dutch tropical colony, having escaped love and civilization. His work takes him to villages plagued by disease and a mysterious madness called Amok that drives the innocent insane. When Helene Haviland asks him to abort her lover’s child before her husband returns, Holk, though captivated by her beauty, refuses. Spurned, she turns to a Chinese practitioner; Holk later finds her in a seedy dive, but it is already too late for both.

Direct adaptation

Read the Amok book behind the movie

A Colonial Doctor's Wounded Pride Becomes an Obsession He Mistakes for Medical Duty · by Stefan Zweig, Anthea Bell

Why this book?

Fyodor Otsep's French film gives Zweig's unnamed colonial doctor and woman the names Dr. Holk and Hélène while retaining the remote Dutch colony, her request for a secret abortion before her husband returns, the doctor's prideful refusal, her resort to unsafe help, and his frantic effort to save her after remorse becomes obsession. The film expands the tropical setting and introduces an apparent epidemic called amok, but the medical encounter and fatal pursuit follow the novella's central sequence directly.

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