Feature Film Treatment · Period Thriller
Based on the unfinished manuscript by Kate Dain (née Kennedy-Grimaldi)
In 1910 Hungary, a man dies alone in his garden staring at the stars while a midwife delivers a girl child across town. That midwife — Auntie Suzie — will run a quiet empire of arsenic and liberation for twenty years, teaching the women of Nagyrév that there are ways to survive a world that gives them no other options. The child born that night will inherit everything: the knowledge, the silence, and the cost.
Nagyrév, Hungary. The Danubian Plain. Between 1910 and 1929, an estimated 50 to 300 men were poisoned with arsenic extracted from flypaper by their wives, lovers, and daughters — organised by a midwife named Zsuzsanna "Auntie Suzie" Fazekas. The largest female serial killer conspiracy in recorded history. Eight women hanged. Dozens imprisoned. The village became known as "The Village of the Widows."
Grimy realism. Mud of the Danubian plain. Claustrophobia of small houses. The vast, indifferent stars. Kurt Weill on the soundtrack. No easy judgements. Auntie Suzie is not a villain. The men are not all monsters. The women are not all innocent. Everyone is surviving. The film trusts the audience to wait.
Fade in — Nagyrév, Danubian Plain, 1910
Dusk falls rapidly on a town nestling in a valley. We swoop down inexorably, speeding like a bullet through lines of gnarly vineyards, into the maze of streets where the noises of a community settling down for supper replace the sound of the wilderness. Slowing. Over the evening bustle we are led toward the sound of a woman in howling agony.
Int. Midwife's Bedroom — Dusk
Two women, naked but for loosely worn sheets. One huge with pregnancy, in the advanced stages of labour. The other — a feisty old bird — squatted by the bed, gripping her by the shoulders, liver-spotted hands locked behind the neck as the woman strains with the need to birth her child.
Int. Man's Bedroom — Dusk
A man writhing in bed, howling in agony, streaming with sweat, tearing up the sheets in distress.
The parallel cutting accelerates. The woman pants, resting between contractions. Her forbearance dominates the scene. The man's eyes roll back. He lurches from the bedroom with the support of every available item of furniture onto the landing. In the half dark we see him in silhouette, bracing himself for the stairs.
Int. Midwife's Bedroom — Night
The women are locked in combat with the unborn child. The midwife darkly mutters encouragement. Beyond the door, the expectant father slumps in a chair with fatigue, looking desperately at the other man in the room.
Int. Stairs — Night
The dying man stumbles down the last few steps, lurches toward a back door, can't open it for his weight against it. Cursing his predicament, he flings himself against the wall and manages to flick the catch. The door swings out and bangs against the wall. In the distance, the coffin-like dunny looms in silhouette against the trees. Clutching his belly, the man draws breath and lurches out of the house and collapses out of frame.
Ext. Garden — Night
Still out of shot, the man's utterances of pain, effort and bafflement at his unexpected demise reach up from the ground. He's not going to make it. We look down at the man. All he has is the stars and the approaching certainty that he might die. Here. Alone. Ten feet from the dunny.
Int. Midwife's Bedroom — Night
The women heave in unison. The mother finally slumps against the midwife, who gently lets her down to the floor where she gathers up her infant.
The midwife can't be doing with all this maternal emotion. She grabs the child. With efficient aplomb she cuts the cord, upends it, belts it, smiles only when it begins howling. Holding it aloft, she inspects its genitals. A sly smile can only mean it's a girl child.
Ext. Garden — Night
The man is shivering violently. A few drops of rain land on his face. His eyes staring at the stars stop blinking. The stars get brighter and brighter until the screen explodes, like a photographer's flash.
TITLE CARD: THE WIDOW MAKER
Opening credits play over Auntie Suzie's exodus from Budapest. The city left behind. A new beginning. Something wicked this way comes.
Cue Kurt Weill's "Seaman's Pub in Wapping."
Zsuzsanna Fazekas. 60s at the opening. Iron will. Eyes that have seen too much. Midwife, abortionist, herbalist, poisoner. She delivers children into the world and removes men from it with equal efficiency. Not a villain. A woman who found the one lever available and pulled it for twenty years. Fled Budapest carrying secrets. Arrives in Nagyrév carrying flypaper.
The girl child born on the night of the first death. Delivered by Auntie Suzie's hands. Grows up in the midwife's shadow. Learns the herbs, the remedies, the language of the body. Becomes Suzie's lieutenant. Falls in love with a man from outside the village. Must choose between two worlds: the living and the widows. Survives the reckoning. Carries the inheritance.
Never named. Dies in the opening scene. Ten feet from the dunny. Staring at stars. His death is the thesis statement: a man alone, in the dark, while women work together by candlelight. His identity may matter later. Or it may not. The film decides.
From outside the village. Represents escape, normalcy, the possibility of a life untouched by arsenic. Tests whether Ilona can exist in two worlds. The relationship forces the question: can you love someone honestly while carrying a secret that would destroy them?
A woman who talks. Not to authorities — to a priest, a lover, someone who can't keep a secret. Not evil. Afraid. Shows how the conspiracy unravels from within. Silence is the only currency. When it's spent, everything collapses.
A woman strains in childbirth. Auntie Suzie works with grim efficiency. She is not gentle. She is effective. Two men wait beyond the door, barred by the midwife's authority. This is women's territory.
Across town, a man writhes in bed. Poison? Illness? He stumbles through his house, down the stairs, into the garden. Collapses ten feet from the outhouse. Stares at the stars. Nobody comes.
The child arrives. A girl. Auntie Suzie cuts the cord, upends her, belts her, smiles when she howls. Inspects. That sly smile. She knows something the parents don't. This child is marked by the night she was born.
The man in the garden stops blinking. Rain on his face. The stars get brighter and brighter until the screen explodes white. He is gone. The film's thesis stated: life and death, same town, same stars, same threshold. The midwife attends one. She is absent from the other.
Titles over Suzie leaving Budapest. A city of glitter and decay behind her. The Danubian plain ahead. Kurt Weill's "Seaman's Pub in Wapping" — cynical, modern, a glitch in the period drama that tells you this is not a costume piece. Something drove her out. Something she's not telling.
Ilona grows up in Nagyrév, drawn to Auntie Suzie like a moth to a lamp. The old woman teaches her: herbs, remedies, the language of the body. How to read a pregnancy. How to read a bruise. How to read which women arrive with questions they can't ask aloud.
Ilona's father dies. Natural causes. But Auntie Suzie was seen visiting the house. Whispers begin. The seed of suspicion — in the town, and in Ilona's mind. She starts watching the old woman differently. Looking for the tell.
1914. Men leave. Women run the farms, the businesses, the families. The village transforms. Women discover competence, independence, authority. Ilona, now a young woman, sees a world without men and finds it... functional. Peaceful. Productive.
Men come back from the trenches. Broken. Violent. Demanding. Expecting the world they left. Finding women who no longer need them and resenting it with fists. Domestic abuse surges. Women begin visiting Auntie Suzie with new complaints: "He beats me." "He drinks." "He's not the man who left."
Auntie Suzie shows Ilona the flypaper. How to soak it. How to extract the arsenic. How much to use. "Not too much. It should look like sickness. Not murder." Ilona's first test: a neighbour's husband who beat her for years. He dies of "stomach trouble." The women of the village notice. They don't ask the authorities. They ask Auntie Suzie.
The operation grows. Not for profit — for protection. A quiet sisterhood of women who have decided they will not be victims. Ilona becomes Suzie's lieutenant. She learns to read bodies, measure doses, keep secrets. The village functions. The cemetery fills. Nobody outside notices.
Ilona falls in love. A man from outside the village. Gentle. Curious. Asks questions she can't answer. The relationship becomes a test: can she exist in two worlds — the world of the living and the world of the widows? Can she love someone while carrying a secret that would hang her?
A death that looks wrong. Too fast. Too obvious. Someone got the dose wrong, or got impatient. A doctor is called. He doesn't suspect poison — not yet — but he notes the case. The first thread. One tug and the whole fabric unravels.
A woman talks. Not to authorities — to a priest, a lover, someone who can't hold silence. The whispers spread beyond the village. The outside world takes notice. Letters are found. The acoustic shield of the village breaks.
Confessions extracted. The conspiracy breaks open. Bodies are exhumed. Arsenic found in graves across two decades. Auntie Suzie is arrested. Ilona must decide: flee, or stay and face what comes.
Auntie Suzie in the dock. The women of Nagyrév testifying. Some defiant. Some broken. The world outside the village cannot understand what happened here. They see murderesses. They do not see the decades of violence, the war, the men who returned as monsters, the system that gave these women no other lever to pull.
Eight women sentenced to hang. Auntie Suzie among them. Ilona watches from the crowd. She was not caught. She was careful. She learned too well.
We do not see the hanging. We see Ilona, standing at the edge of the village, looking toward the horizon. Behind her, the gallows. In front of her, the future. The camera holds on her face. Whatever she feels, she does not show it. She learned that from Suzie too.
Ilona leaves Nagyrév. She carries a small pouch — arsenic, carefully wrapped. Not to use. To remember. Survival has a cost. She is the daughter of women who refused to die quietly.
Years later. Ilona, now old, returns to the village. Quiet. The widows gone. She walks to Auntie Suzie's grave — unmarked, but she knows where it is. She places a stone. She whispers something. We do not hear it. She walks away. The village quiet behind her. The stars above, indifferent as they were the night she was born.
The opening scene. The midwife attends one, is absent from the other. The threshold is the same. The film's entire visual grammar built on this parallel: creation and destruction as twin functions of the same force.
Ilona inherits not just knowledge but the weight of the women who came before. The arsenic pouch she carries at the end is not a weapon. It's a reliquary. A rosary made of poison.
The conspiracy survives as long as the women keep silent. Twenty years of silence. When one woman speaks, it all collapses. Silence is the only currency. When it's spent, everything is exposed.
Auntie Suzie knows bodies. How they give life. How they can be unmade. She is midwife and poisoner — the same knowledge applied in two directions. The body as instrument, not punishment.
THE WIDOW MAKER. Not just the poison. Not just the women. The war that broke the men. The system that trapped the women. The village that looked away. Everyone in this story is making widows, one way or another.
Single location (village + Budapest bookends). Ensemble cast with two leads (Suzie, Ilona). Period dress but rural — no grand ballrooms, no imperial splendour. Mud, vineyards, small houses, candlelight. The visual economy of poverty. Comparable productions: Son of Saul, 1917, Women Talking. Hungarian tax incentives + UK/European co-production treaties. Real village locations on the Danubian plain still exist.
Women Talking (Sarah Polley) — women deciding collectively whether to stay or go. The Duchess — women trapped in systems, finding the one lever. Killers of the Flower Moon — systematic poisoning for profit, decades of complicity. Capernaum — poverty as the engine of impossible choices. Son of Saul — Hungarian production, tight focus, historical horror rendered intimately.
Based on an unfinished manuscript written decades ago. The opening scene survived intact. The rest was always waiting.
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