1920 film by John W. Brunius

Synnöve lives with her parents at the farm Solbakken on a sunny hill. Thorbjörn, who lives at Granliden in the shadow of a big mountain, often looks wistfully up to Solbakken. As teenagers they meet and fall in love. Another boy, Knud Nordhaug, is also yearning for Synnöve.

The wife of a dull-witted miller is in her deathbed and the miller must find a new woman to marry. He is expected to marry the sister of a local forester, a refined woman he wants to love. She is gentle and motherly, though a rather austere Christian. But the miller lusts after his maidservant, Lise, a ruthless and calculating woman determined to climb up the social ladder. Lise tries to use her lower class sensuality and a bit of magic to entice the miller.

This crime drama is composed of three acts of approximate 10-minute duration each. The story itself, shown in a long flashback style, leads us into the overall reconstruction of the crime, made by a mysteriously masked character.
The film was released 28 August 1916 in Finland. A fragmentary print was recovered in 2001 by the Cinémathèque Française; in 2002 the fragments were preserved, with Swedish intertitles and supplemented with production photographs, by the Svenska Filminstituet in 2002.
Writing about Victor Sjöström and quoted by Charlotte de Silva for the Embassy of Sweden in London, Jon Wengström of the Swedish Film Institute writes, "The pictorial compositions in Havsgamar/Sea Vultures (1916) and the complex narrative structure in the recently rediscovered Dodskyssen/Kiss of Death (1916) show a director in full command of the medium.