If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power

Lila, a young queen, returns to her castle and finds that the king is dead. She then stares into a mirror and finds that her reflection is a separate entity, Lilith, and dashes out to the balcony after Lilith unsettles the court members. The court members discuss what to do with Lila while revisiting a family tree. The film then cuts to Lila being prepared to take the king’s duties as she sits on her throne; bored and a bit vainglorious, she abandons this and walks out to the balcony again and witnesses a strange fiery light. The kingdom then gathers to mourn the king’s death, while Lila felt contented about it. She then shows a bruise to the Matriarch and the Aristocrat, revealing that he physically assaulted her, in order to explain her contentment.

That night, Lilith comes forth from the mirror and stabs a sleeping Lila in the stomach. Awakening from a nightmare, Lila rushes to pull out seeds from a drawer and urinate on them to test if she is pregnant. She looks in the mirror, seeing Lilith’s hands rubbing her stomach, and grows unsettled. She then decides to go to a bathhouse to relax, but she flees in terror as her reflection continues to show Lilith creepily rubbing her stomach.

To celebrate the king’s death, Lila gathers her friends for a day out, becomes drunk and causes mayhem in the villages. She then tries to ride back to the castle before falling off her horse, and it runs away. A drunk Lila lonely wanders into the forest, and stumbles upon a witch’s cabin. The witch feels her stomach and begins teaching Lila a lamaze technique causing her to become frightened and run away, eventually finding her way back to the castle. Upon stumbling back to the bedroom, she found that the seeds she urinated on earlier had sprouted, upsetting her, as it means she is pregnant.

The Aristocrat, fed up with Lila’s selfish attitude, claims that given Lila is not of royal blood, she is a common widow and should not retain her title as Queen, especially considering what happened while she was drunk. Lila is sentenced to be executed after her child is born; if the child is a boy, it will be raised in the court, but if it is a girl, it will also be killed. An enraged Lila walks out to the lake to drown herself and her child, but as she felt it kicking her stomach, she changes her mind and swims through the lake to flee from the castle, trying to find the Witch’s cabin to give birth in a more safe area, as her water breaks. A maid then tells the Aristocrat that she witnessed Lila running away.

Lila flashes back to the night the king died, revealing that she had poisoned his wine and he raped and impregnated her, and the king collapsed to death just after that incident; the rape resulted in Lila’s pregnancy. The Aristocrat find Lila after she gives birth with the help of the witch. They burn down the cabin, presumably killing the witch, and throw Lila and her child onto a wagon back to the castle. She then wakes in a cell, which has been unlocked by an unknown person and finds out that all the guards are dead. She then makes her way to the nursery and the maids are frightened when she finds her baby. She carries the baby with her to the guillotine and gives it to the maid. She then thinks what would have been if she had been more loving and imagines a peaceful life with her child. Smiling at the thought of it, she is abruptly beheaded.

Lilith escapes from the mirror again. She wanders around the castle and looks over the dead bodies of the guards and Aristocrat, which she presumably killed. She picks up the crown that formerly belonged to Lila and observes it, before leaving the palace.