This film combines three stories, but in the same world, as we understand when we first see the second and third king attending the first king’s funeral. There are names in the credits, but during the film I didn’t hear any. The characters will be seen together again in another scene at the end.
These stories are clearly linked by unhealthy obsessions that leads to wrong decisions and bad actions, and the unavoidable tragedy that follows.
The first: A queen (Salma Hayek) is terribly unhappy because her greatest desire is to have a child and she can’t have any, until a man tells her of one way she could fulfill her wish. She must eat the heart of a sea dragon cooked by a virgin, and she’ll get pregnant instantly. He warns her that there will be a great price to pay, a life for a life, but she doesn’t care. The king slays the beast but he himself is killed by it. The queen doesn’t mourn, seeing him dead on the floor when she comes to collect the heart. She can only think of one thing. A virgin girl is called to cook the heart for her. The girl inhales the small of the heart cooking, and she too becomes pregnant (sure, this raises the question: why did the queen had to eat the whole thing and she simply needed to smell it? I don’t know, maybe because she was a virgin and also healthy, while the queen had tried the normal way to have a child but she couldn’t have any).
In a day they both give birth to a son. At the king’s funeral, we also meet the other kings of the movie: the one with a daughter (Toby Jones) and the one who seems to only care about sex (Vincent Cassel).
The story moves forward sixteen years. The queen’s son Elias, with hair and eyelashes white as the sea dragon, spends his time playing with the girl’s son Jonah, who looks exactly like him. They are happy when they are together, but the queen can’t stand it. She orders the servant to keep her son away from the prince, and orders her son to stop seeing Jonah. The boys are close friends and feel like brothers, and keep seeing each other, until one night the queen sees Jonah and mistakes him for Elias, at least until she touches his hands and starts suspecting. She spies on them, and hears Elias’ plan to share his life with his friend. Elias says that they could take turns at being king, share everything and give Jonah’s mother a good life. The queen is terribly jealous and tries to kill Jonah, who hides and escapes. Jonah never tells Elias what his mother tried to do, and the next day he prepares to leave. Elias wants to stop him, but Jonah says he must go. He cuts a tree’s roots and tells him that he’ll be fine as long as that water will be clear. One day Elias sees that it is no more clear, and leaves in search of his friend, worried about him. The queen calls again the same man dressed in black, and he tells her again that her wish is a dangerous one and can only be obtained by violence. He also tells her that she brought it upon herself when she tried to separate the inseparable.
Elias finds Jonah’s family and learns that he has been missing for three days, so he ventures in the woods to find him. Jonah in injured, when a bat-like creature attacks him. Elias comes in time to save him and kill the beast; later will see that it was in fact the queen. Elias brings his friend back to his family and returns home.
Second story:
This sex-addict king wants to have every young woman he sees. One day he hears a woman singing but doesn’t see her face, only which door she enters. He sends her a jewel as a gift and then knocks on her door. He doesn’t know that inside there is no young girl, only two elderly sisters. Dora has liked very much the jewel, and sees an opportunity to have more. The king insists, reminding her that he is after all her king and he could order her to go with him instead of asking. She accepts at the condition that all lights must be out. She goes to him and they spend the night together, but he’s horrified when he lights a candle and sees how she really looks like, and he calls his guards to throw her off the window. She doesn’t die, the bedsheets entangled in the trees branches. A woman, a witch I guess, helps her down and breastfeeds her. When she wakes up Dora is a young woman. The king happens to see her during a hunt and falls for her beauty and marries her. Dora sends an invitation, along with a rich dress and jewels, to her sister Imma. She tells her that now she can have everything she wants. Dora tells her that she’ll take care of her but also that she, Imma, must keep it a secret, nobody must know the truth about them.
They’ve been together all their lives, alone in their little house, and now Imma can’t cope with being alone, even if not far away. She refuses to leave, she won’t go back home, she tells everyone that she’s the queen’s sister and of course everyone thinks she’s nuts. Dora repeatedly tells her to go home, that they can’t stay together anymore because she’s old. Imma asks her how did she become young again but Dora doesn’t know herself. Imma insists, wants to know how to become young herself that that they might live together again, and at last to get rid of her Dora says that she was flayed and grew a new skin. When the king arrives Dora hides her sister and goes to him and they start having sex. Imma seems fascinated by it and is discovered. The king is again horrified by the appearance of an old woman and calls his guards to throw her out yet again. Dora tries to stop him by telling him that she’s her old neighbour, but nothing can stop him. Once alone and outside, Imma starts searching for someone willing to flay her, and finds one when she offers to give him all her jewels. He takes her to the woods and flays her, and she comes back to Dora’s castle all bloody and skin-less.
Third story:
This king has a daughter, Violet, who loves him very much. We see her playing a tune she wrote specially for him and yet he doesn’t even listen, fascinated by a flea that jumps from his one hand to the other. He hides the flea in his hand and hurries to his room. He puts it in a little glass box, feeding it with his blood, building little things like a small carriage for it to pull. In another scene he brings a big steak for it to eat, it’s growing and we see it’s already as big as a dog. His daughter is getting bored and would like to go away and see a bit of the world, but he tells her that she’ll do that when she gets married. One night he calls for the doctor urgently, and the poor doc is shocked to see a giant flea in the king’s room. There’s nothing he can do for it of course, and the king’s devastated when it dies. Later he’ll tell his daughter that he’s found a way to get her a husband. She’s not too happy with his idea of a competition, of the whole idea of becoming the wife of whoever wins, but he’s enthusiastic at his idea. He challenges anyone to find out whose skin is that, sure that, being so big, nobody will ever guess it’s a flea. Suddenly a big scary ogre enters the room, but the king lets him try, as he stated before that anyone can try. The ogre sniffs it and guesses right; Violet runs out, intending to kill herself but the king stops her. Nevertheless he tells her that he gave his word and can’t take it back, so she has to go with the ogre. It’s a long and hard way to the ogre’s cave, and she finds it full with bones , nothing around but rock and bones. She’s scared of him and doesn’t want him but she is now his wife (well, there was no ceremony but she’s been given to him as his wife) and he has sex with her anyway. I call it rape, but they once called it conjugal duty.
When he is out she sees a woman and calls her for help, but she’s like on a mountain and there’s a big void between them. The woman tells her that she’ll come back the next day with her sons to help her. Seeing her go away Violet thinks she’s lost but the next morning she still looks around in hope, and is happy to see that the woman really came back with her whole family. A young man carries her on his shoulder and walks on a rope to get to the other side. The ogre sees them but they manage to cut the rope before he gets to them. They think they are safe and go away, but the ogre is not dead and finds them and kills the whole family. She’s scared but she has nowhere to run so she tries to calm him down with slow gesture and a hug. He motions for her to get on his shoulders so she can bring her back ‘home’, and she pretends to agree but then she cuts his throat. She goes back home, where the king is ill but hurries out of bed to go see her. She’s all bloody, and has the head of the ogre with her, and shows it to him telling him “this is the husband you chose for me”. The king ashamed falls to his knees and cries. Everyone at this point kneels to her, the only one standing. She also cries, maybe for what she went through, maybe for the love she had for that man that caused it all.
She will be crowned as the new queen, and at the coronation we see again Elias, obviously without his mother, and the sex-addict king with Dora, who notices that she’s turning again into an old woman and flees. We don’t know what it will become of her but we know that she’ll now be alone.
Their obsessions brought them all to destruction and loneliness and tragedy.
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