Pulpmovies Reviews

Writer/director Randy Greif certainly has a very unique vision, as is amply demonstrated in The Three Trials, the story of Catherine (Molinee Green), a nun with a unique form of narcolepsy.

Catherine’s troubles start when she stumbles across the priest of her church (Michael Q. Schmidt) indulging in fetish sex with the convent’s dominatrix Mother Superior (Sirena Scott). Aroused and in trouble, her troubles start when she is sent to the wonderfully grimy basement of a nearby cathedral to face the first of her trials.

The film starts very firmly in nunsploitation territory, but quickly takes a very surreal turn and becomes much, much more as Catherine is forced to confront and accept her sexuality.

Moving beyond the religious life, by way of a montage that reflects both the reality of her secular life and the submissive fantasies that are now – and maybe always were – a part of her being, Catherine finds herself living in Blackheart’s Castle.

In terms of narrative, this is the most explicitly dream-like part of the film. No attempt is made to explain how she arrived here, or even where ‘here’ is – and, as such, it works more as a fantasy, and a deliberately adolescent one at that. Catherine the nymph, like Catherine the nun, has a deep desire for devotion but this time around the desire is more romantic than religious.

Although the narrative here is the most dream-like, the imagery in this part of the film is the least. And Greif does manage to come up with some very striking imagery that does manage to very effectively convey the eroticism of Catherine’s personality. The imagery is also often quite erotic in its own right.

It also has to be noted that, regardless of the description of the synopsis so far, the film does not follow a linear narrative. It is divided into three broad sections, each of which deals with a different aspect of Catherine’s submissive sexuality. But, as with both personality and sexuality, these aspects do impinge on each other and – consequently – the events in the three sections do refer, backwards and forwards, to each other.

The end of the second section of the film sees Catherine being rescued by Beast (Maximilien Herholz), a sasquatch-like creature who, by the beginning of the final section, has become a man. And, as this man is more than happy to accommodate Catherine’s desires, we see her relationship with him becoming increasingly extreme and masochistic.

More than anything, this part of the film made me think of The Story of O and really does capture the same sense of utter submission that is portrayed in the novel. And, as with O, Catherine’s journey is one that follows an unrelenting logic of its own and one that is engaging, erotic and more than a little disturbing.

Where The Three Trials is unique, however, is in Greif’s use of a surreal and genuinely dream-like approach to narrative, along with some deliberately absurdist elements, to obscure the boundaries between reality and fantasy. And, although the imagery does become a little self-indulgent at times, it does come together to generate a very striking, and very memorable, visual experience.

This is a film that doesn’t sit comfortably in any genre but one that very effectively pulls together elements from a variety of influences to create something that both unique and very powerful indeed.

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