By Nia Edwards-Behi
I’ve been anticipating German Angst for a while now, ever since seeing the project announced on Michal Kosakowski’s Facebook page. Kosakowski directed the fascinating documentary Zero Killed, and here has worked alongside Andreas Marschall (director of the giallo homage Masks) and Jorg Buttgereit (director of the recently re-released Nekromantik) on this very German anthology. I must admit I was nervous going in to the film, wondering if it might be a little, well, a little extreme for the sake of it. The poster and trailer didn’t do much to assuage my worries (T&A! Young girls!) but regardless it was probably one of the films I was most anxiously anticipating at BIFFF. Luckily, my fears were unfounded. This was not the gratuitous film I was expecting. Unlike some other recent anthology films, German Angst benefits from only having three segments – all are on a theme, all are very subtly interlinked, and all have clearly different authorial voices. The first section, Final Girl by Buttgereit, is the shortest, followed by Make a Wish by Kosakowski and Alraune by Marschall.
Buttgereit’s section is good, albeit a little slight. It opens the film with a very challenging series of close ups of a young…woman? girl? accompanied by a voice over to match, which describes the biology of a guinea pig. It’s revealed that this is indeed a young girl we’re staring at, as she wakes up and attends to her pets. The house she inhabits is a mess, but she pours herself cereal for breakfast and listens to the news on the radio. Then, she attends to the man tied up in a bedroom.
This section does feel a bit more like a sketch than a fully-fledged short, and I suspect I enjoyed it a bit more than most because of the very, well, manly mutilation which takes place. I would argue that, however slight the plot of the section is, it is also very stylistically interesting. The voice over about guinea pigs could relate to any number of different aspects of the plot. There’s also an interesting use of editing that leaves us wondering what’s really happening – how much is real and how much is the girl’s imagination. It’s perhaps left a little too unclear (or maybe that’s just me), but it’s interesting nevertheless.
Kosakowski’s segment opens with a deaf and dumb couple on a date of sorts, exploring an abandoned building. The man gives the woman a gift of a necklace, explains that it was his grandmother’s, and tells her the story of how the necklace had helped her escape from Nazis. Inside the abandoned building the couple are attacked by a group of racist and terrifying thugs, who react particularly badly upon discovering the couple have Polish names (though, as they point out, they’re German). As the attack grows increasingly violent, the old necklace might hold the key to saving themselves from this situation – or it might doom them entirely.
Kosakowski’s segment of the film is by far my favourite. It felt, to me, to be the most genuinely transgressive of all three segments, by tackling head on not only notions of racism, but of nationhood, history and violence as well. There is a particularly powerful scene which managed to silence the rowdy BIFFF crowd (and this was by far the busiest screening I attended there). A character essentially gives a powerful but complex speech about persecution to another character, shot in such a way that the speech is delivered almost directly into camera. The horror of this section is as much the cruel – and clever – sting in the tale, as much it is the violence which has preceded it. To learn that much of this violence, enacted by the gang as they torture the couple, came from Kosakowski’s own experience of being attacked for being Polish retrospectively made it all the more powerful. This is, for me, the stand out segment of German Angst.
Closing the film is the longest segment. A man has recently reconciled with his girlfriend. He recounts to her the strange events that happened to him after their abrupt break-up. Drowning his sorrows in drink and taking himself to a strange club, the man instantly makes a connection with an attractive dancer. This leads him to join a hedonistic cult, where a drug is administered in order to experience ultimate sexual pleasure – the only proviso being that a tight blindfold must be in place at all times. Of course, our man peeks, and finds himself trapped in a spiral of events that irrevocably change his life.
As the synopsis might suggest, Marschall’s segment is the T&A section of the film. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it is a tale obsessed with excess of all kinds. Like with Masks, the strength here is the visual style, and it’s clearly what Marschall excels at. The characters are either plunged in deep darknesses or bathed in lush colours. The plot, however, is very meandering, and for me the segment felt over-long. This feeling was not helped by what seemed to be a strange sound mix, which made it very difficult to understand what the characters were saying (this segment is in English), especially the unusually deep-voiced leading man, Milton Welsh. While Marschall’s segment is probably my least favourite, it is not without its strengths, and certainly once things get weird – and they do get very weird – the segment comes into its own.
Overall, German Angst was a surprising and fascinating experience. The film really came across as a true collaborative effort, even though each director was given his own time to shine. Unless there really are three more as talented horror filmmakers in Germany, I do hope they steer clear of a sequel, and leave this as an impressive testament to three horror filmmaking talents.