The Blood Rose 1970

Frédéric Lansac is a botanist and portraitist who runs a beauty salon, living a quietly cultured life built on art and appearances. He meets and falls in love with Anne at a dress ball, and their whirlwind romance quickly leads to marriage. The couple moves into Lansac’s home, where their happiness is cruelly shattered during one of his portrait exhibitions: Anne’s face is pushed into a bonfire by a jealous woman, leaving her horribly scarred and marked by the burn.

The injury plunges Anne into isolation within her own walls, and her mental state begins to fray as she retreats from the world. She is haunted not only by the physical wound but also by intimate, unsettling dreams involving her nurse. Meanwhile, Lansac resolves to reverse the damage by turning to a former plastic surgeon, Professeur Römer(/actor/howard-vernon), who has stopped practicing conventional medicine and now caters only to criminals with cosmetic interventions. Driven by a need to restore his wife’s beauty, Lansac coerces the doctor into attempting a grafting procedure on Anne.

To fund and enable the operation, Lansac schemes further, luring two of his female clients to his home to serve as donors for the new face. Tragically, those plans collapse as the would-be donors die during the process, underscoring the dangerous consequences of Lansac’s desperation. The arrival of Barbara—the sister of Anne’s former nurse—at the château introduces a new tension: Barbara seeks her sister but instead confronts Anne, who insists on reclaiming her lost face. Barbara manages to escape the peril, while Römer’s own fate becomes sealed as he takes his own life.

As Anne’s madness deepens and the lines between love, vanity, and control blur, Lansac confronts a harrowing truth about the consequences of his ambitions. In a final, grim act, he has his wife killed by his servants and then surrenders himself to the police, a chilling testament to how far one man will go to preserve an illusion of beauty.