A ‘Corsage’ Hater Is Trying to Sabotage Its Oscar Chances in the Most Bizarre Fashion
The Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, shut down its message forums in 2017, lamenting that they were “no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide.” It came as a blow to countless weirdos using their precious, fleeting time on earth to debate insane fan theories about Forrest Gump, but you can still get your point across on the site’s crowdsourced trivia pages, as someone with a grudge against the 2022 film Corsage has proven.
Corsage is a historical drama directed by Marie Kreutzer, starring Vicky Krieps as Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who reigned alongside husband Emperor Franz Josef I from 1854 to 1898. It explores the confines of the monarch’s life ahead of her 40th birthday, particularly the pressure to remain thin and beautiful: she wears a severely-tightened corset while displaying symptoms of what today we’d call an eating disorder, fiercely protecting her public image in a way that anticipates contemporary fame.
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Krieps’ turn as Elisabeth (or “Sissi”) has earned her accolades this awards season, including the Un Certain Regard prize for best performance at Cannes and a European Film Award for Best Actress, while the movie itself has received generally positive reviews and made the Oscars’ shortlist for Best International Feature Film. Yet, since sometime before July 23, 2022, an anonymous user has been steadily updating IMDb’s trivia section on Corsage with hostile and belittling comments presented under the guise of background information. Jeopardy! host and trivia master Ken Jennings noticed the unusual tone when perusing the site this week.
Obsessed with the IMDb trivia page for Corsage (2022), where pretty much every entry is throwing shade at Corsage (2022). https://t.co/ZnA0yR9nNe
— Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) January 13, 2023
“This is one of five Austrian-German productions about Empress Elisabeth of Austria to be released between 2021-2022,” reads one of the earliest entries, which goes on to sniffily report that Netflix’s 2022 series about Sissi, The Empress, “was a huge hit on Netflix, being watched by nearly 20 million homes globally and a total of over 100 million hours in the first weeks of its release, at the same time that Corsage was struggling to make $1 million at the box office worldwide against its $8 million budget despite a heavy promotion.” Certainly sounds like the author had an axe to grind!
From that summer onward, as revealed by website snapshots from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the Corsage trivia page received more than 20 additional edits, essentially all criticizing the film and the circumstances of its production and release. (IMDb’s suggested criteria for adding a piece of trivia is that it “should be interesting” and could “be an answer in a game.”) There’s the fact that the actor who plays Krieps’ son is just five years younger than her; quibbles with deliberate anachronisms and historical inaccuracies; and an insinuation that Corsage was only financed in part by the Luxembourg Film Fund because Krieps’ father, Bob Krieps, was once its president and still holds influence over it as the country’s director general of the Ministry of Culture. (His department does indeed supervise the fund, which is credited for co-financing several of her films, and the same comment shows up on the IMDb trivia pages for those titles going back at least a decade.)
The author also accuses the graphic designer of a Corsage poster of plagiarizing promotional art from the 2018 period drama The Favourite.
Reminds me of the poster for The Favourite
— Caleb Clayton Cohen (@claybryce) May 10, 2022
By far the longest and most serious grievance, however — if we put aside the ire over Krieps allegedly lying about being a smoker in real life, and the use of the song “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” which was “released over 90 years after the film’s events” — concerns the #MeToo movement.
The update, added in late December, says: “On June 18, 2022, Austrian director Katharina Mückstein shared a story on her Instagram account that read: ‘Tonight a perpetrator will stand on the stage and will be applauded. And there is nothing we can do to counter that.’” The author concludes that the unnamed individual was a person involved in the making of Corsage, which had its Vienna premiere that evening, then goes on to paint Kreutzer and Krieps as hypocrites for using #MeToo to market the film while failing to cut ties with a male actor about whom unsettling “rumors” had circulated. On Friday, it emerged that Florian Teichtmeister, who plays Emperor Franz Josef I, has been charged with — and confessed to — possession of child pornography. But it wasn’t clear that Mückstein had been referring to him in June, nor that the “rumors” pertained to this sort of crime.
In any event, it seems as if the devoted Corsage hater was more broadly offended by the unconventional biopic’s “feminist” themes, perceiving some attempt to cast Empress Elisabeth as a victim of the patriarchy or an empowered woman ahead of her time. In a post describing her vanity and cruelty, the writer concludes: “She couldn’t be further from a feminist.” The same note clarifies that Sissi “never cut her hair by her own choice,” a symbolic act of rebellion depicted in the film. Elsewhere, the critic writes: “Production made five different wigs for Krieps to wear throughout filming. Empress Elisabeth was famous for her long and lustrous hair.”
So, who is waging this strange, lonely war against Krieps, Kreutzer and their approach to historical narrative? IMDb doesn’t display the profile of the user who submits a given trivia comment, and Susan Norget Film Promotion, which handles PR for Corsage, did not immediately return a request for comment as to who might have a vendetta against this creative team. The mystery scribe took aim at the agency as well, for a “For Your Consideration” kit that included Austrian chocolate products bearing the image of Empress Elisabeth: “Director Marie Kreutzer and actress Vicky Krieps have both criticized all the products and merchandising that are sold in Austria with images of Empress Elisabeth before their film’s marketing team did the same thing to promote Corsage to awards voters,” they complained.
However, because much of the phrasing in this “trivia” matches wording on the Wikipedia page for Corsage, one can make an educated guess about who got heated enough to trash it in this meticulous and roundabout fashion. The closest thing we have to a smoking gun is the #MeToo stuff, which first appeared on the Wiki pages for Katharina Mückstein and Corsage on December 22, 2023, and was added to IMDb around the same time. The Wikipedia editor behind those changes, who goes by “Zoolver” and lists “history,” “film” and “celebrities” among their interests, is quite probably the IMDb editor as well.
As to their evidently personal beef with Krieps, there must be an interesting backstory, and Rolling Stone invites Zoolver to come forward and share it. Until then, we’ll have to be satisfied with following this shadowy influence campaign — which does, after all, have the flavor of gossip in a royal court.
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