Martha

Martha (1974) is a Rainer Werner Fassbinder made-for-television film you can watch online on iFILM. Margit Carstensen plays Martha, a quiet librarian past thirty who has never made a decision without her parents — and then both parents die, and suddenly the question she has avoided her whole life is unavoidable.

She meets Helmut, played with chilling restraint by Karlheinz Böhm, and announces to a colleague within minutes: "That's the man I'm going to marry." The marriage is not a rescue. It's a transfer. Helmut doesn't raise his voice. He rewrites her tastes, her schedule, her sense of herself — slowly enough that Martha barely notices until fear has replaced whatever she once felt.

Fassbinder stages the whole thing with surgical precision: no editorial comment, no easy villain, just the mechanics of domination played out in close-up. Stream Martha (1974) online on iFILM.