Best thing you’ll see all week: The Corpse of Anna Fritz

The Corpse of Anna Fritz opens with a shot of an unseen orderly wheeling a sheet-draped corpse down a corridor. A news voiceover explains that Anna Fritz, a world renowned actress, has died. Her body has been taken to an unspecified hospital to avoid a mob scene. The orderly rolls the gurney into the morgue, gingerly peels pack the sheet to reveal a beautiful woman, and snaps a picture with his cell phone. It gets worse from there.

In an American movie called The Body, three chicks accidentally kill a dude. Oops. To avoid getting in trouble, they posthumously stage a rape so they can claim self-defense. But that doesn’t work out so well when they discover they didn’t actually kill the dude, but just broke his neck. Awkward. The Body falls apart mainly because of the implausibility of its characters’ motivations and a conspicuous weak link in the cast.

The Corpse of Anna Fritz, a fascinating inverse of The Body, has no such shortcomings. The characters do what they do because they’re reprehensible. Spanish writer/director Hector Vincens isn’t interested in our sympathy. He’s just interested in subjecting us to his cruel thriller, setting the stage with one of the most ghastly reveals since Jack Nicholson’s tryst in room 237. It gets a bit clumsy from there, with lots of flopping around on the floor. But that scene — you’ll know it — easily sustains The Corpse of Anna Fritz until graves are spit on.

By the way, you know how you can hear outlandish things when you hear someone sing in a different language? Without the distinctive patter of that language, your brain translates the syllables into English. To my ears, it sounded like the song playing over the credits was “Cats Know Everything”. Ha ha. I must be mishearing a Spanish phrase.

Nope. The end credits song is in English and it’s called “Cats Know Everything”. Corpse of Anna Fritz: 2. Me: 0.

The Corpse of Anna Fritz is available exclusively on flixfling.com, whatever that is, starting March 8.