THE DOOR

'The Door' is not a book you go unmarked from having read. A surface-forgivable tale of a spirit worker, the writer Magda, who takes on the elderly housekeeper Emerence — she is illiterate and despises anyone who does not live by the work of their hands. They could hardly be more different, but slip into a close friendship.

Soon a power struggle begins between the two women. Their relationship oscillates between caring and emotional blackmail, and there is always something disturbing beneath the surface of their relationship. Emerence effectively takes over all control of the household and sets up rules on what to do and what not to do. The house transforms into a battleground of alternating affection and dependency, where the strength ratio is negotiable on a daily basis. Emerence has violent outbursts of rage, threatening, blackmailing and cursing Magda whenever she doesn't get her way. And Magda again comes up with something that she will forever regret.

Emerence, it turns out, has a hidden past that no one in the neighborhood knows about, and she guards her own home with great zeal, where no one is allowed to cross the threshold. When Magda finally finds out what Emerence's secret is covering up, the tragedy is complete, irreversible, and relentlessly lonely.

Experience a narrative that stands in the shadow of the former communist rule in Hungary, where what hides behind the door becomes a microcosm of fascism, guilt, oppression and class struggle. Cruel, unshakable and existential, just as we like it on REPUBLIQUE/REVOLVER.

Starring Karen-Lise Mynster as Emerence and Ida Cæcilie Rasmussen as Magda, it will be an intense study of what it means to lose, fail, be rejected, feel loneliness and inadequacy — in short: what it means to be human.