Available on DVD: “Black Butterflies”

Paula Van der Oest’s Black Butterflies is a rending biographical portrait of the poet Ingrid Jonker, who has been called the South African Sylvia Plath because both women destroyed themselves at an early age and had what might be called "daddy issues." Plath was 30 when she died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1963. Jonker drowned herself two years later at 31.

Her poetry gained an international platform in 1994, when Nelson Mandela read her poem The Child Who Was Shot Dead by Soldiers in Nyanga (Die Kind) during his first address to the new South African Parliament. This searing work, in which the spirit of a slain child "raises his fist against his father in the march of the generations who scream Africa," comes from Jonker’s second collection of Afrikaans-language poems, Smoke and Ochre. Mandela’s tribute is heard at the end of the film.

Although Black Butterflies shows Jonker witnessing the event that inspired the poem, the movie is not a high-minded political film recycling the outrages associated with apartheid. In Greg Latter’s screenplay Ingrid (Carice van Houten) connects the death of a child shot by the police to her secret abortion after becoming pregnant by her lover, Jack Cope (Liam Cunningham), a novelist 20 years her senior.

Her affair with Jack, whom she meets when he rescues her after she swims too far out to sea, is the spine of the drama. The depiction of her emotional and mental instability is an unsparing portrait of a tortured soul. Van Houten portrays her as more than just a moody, volatile handful. To become involved with Ingrid is to juggle lighted sticks of dynamite. One minute she is ravenously needy, the next a vicious child who screams, "You’re nothing," if she doesn’t get her way.

Van Houten manages the difficult task of capturing the emotional and sexual magnetism of this toxic woman at the mercy of her emotions, and her intensity makes her at once irresistible and dangerous to men. When Jack, who is married with two children, says he is completely in love with her, you believe him. Ingrid sleeps with whomever she wants whenever she wants. The first rupture in their bond comes when she makes a blatant pass at another man in front of him at a party.

As their relationship seesaws, Jack barely tolerates her promiscuity and drinking, and is repeatedly wounded by her recklessness and cruelty. But as Ingrid’s mental health spirals downward, he wearily comes to her rescue. He is one of two lovers in the story who tell her, "You drain me," which is an understatement considering her demands.

Jack’s stabilizing influence is no match against Ingrid’s father, Abraham (Rutger Hauer), with whom she plays lethal emotional games. A racist Afrikaner — and the minister for censorship in Parliament — he is outspoken in his belief that blacks have inferior intelligence. He calls his daughter a slut and is infuriated when she gives a newspaper interview criticizing his politics.

But she can’t resist baiting him by presenting him with her poems, which he detests. In one scene she coaxes him into reading aloud The Child Who Was Shot Dead, until he refuses to continue and tears it to shreds. Yet he is enough of a parent to take her in when she has nowhere else to go, even though it is like welcoming an arsonist into his home. The hate flows both ways. She fantasizes that he is poisoning her. And when her mental health deteriorates, he gives consent for her to have the electroshock therapy that finally breaks her spirit and destroys her gift.

In its jagged style and tone Black Butterflies is as close to an inside-out view of Jonker’s tumultuous life as a movie could go without sinking into chaos. Its hues are continuously changing, and the seaside weather around Cape Town reflects her tempestuous emotional life.

The climate and environment, though dramatically beautiful, are rarely calm. Ingrid is so self-consuming that even her sister, Anna (Candice D’Arcy), and her daughter, Simone (played by several children), from a failed marriage are little more than baggage she drags around. As for literary politics, there is only a token effort to acknowledge her support of a persecuted black writer (Thamsanqua Mbongo).

Black Butterflies mostly avoids the sentimental cliché of the artist as anguished martyr and is content to be a harrowing psychological drama. At the same time, it gives Jonker’s despairing poetry its due in brief spoken interludes and shows her, in a creative fever, scrawling it on the walls of her apartment.

The movie reminds you of the extent to which poetry has been marginalized as a cultural force since the early 1960s. When Jack and his best friend, Uys Krige (Graham Clarke), meticulously reassemble torn fragments of her work into the manuscript that is published as Smoke and Ochre, it really matters.