She is actually just a little girl, on her way travelling all around the world, with a side trip to Berlin, Germany, where she met the wrong person and so here is my review of a movie made in my hometown Berlin with Teresa Palmer and Max Riemelt in
Berlin Syndrome (2017)
A passionate holiday romance leads to an obsessive
relationship, when an Australian photojournalist wakes one morning in a
Berlin apartment and is unable to leave.
Director:
Cate ShortlandStars:
Teresa Palmer, Max Riemelt, Lucie Aron
While holidaying in Berlin, Australian photojournalist, Clare meets
Andi, a charismatic local man and there is an instant attraction between
them. A night of passion ensues. But what initially appears to be the
start of a romance suddenly takes an unexpected and sinister turn when
Clare wakes the following morning to discover Andi has left for work and
locked her in his apartment. An easy mistake to make, of course, except
Andi has no intention of letting her go again.
The movie is intense, with a monster performance of Teresa Palmer and a monster in person by Max Riemelt, the movie is nothing else than suffocating and brutal at the end.
I've
never seen Teresa Palmer in a film before, which is especially weird
because she's Australian. I'm sorry that I haven't, because she was
utterly fantastic in Berlin Syndrome. You can feel her pain, her desperation and some of her shouts and screams goes deep under your skin and it is so intense.
The story is fairly simple; an Australian tourist is swept off her feet by a charming local in Berlin, staying with him for a couple of days before realising that she isn't allowed to leave.
Palmer's performance as Clare is so excellent that counterpart Max Riemelt can barely keep up, but keep up he does. His character, Andi, can be dashing, friendly and witty, or he can be sinister, cold and (perhaps most frightening) entirely unreadable. While director Cate Shortland surely deserves an enormous share of the credit, a scene I found simply remarkable is one where Andi suffers a loss and we as an audience are still able to feel sympathy alongside Clare for this monster of a human being.
Presumably borrowing the title from Stockholm Syndrome, the lines in the relationship of Andi and Clare do begin to blur throughout the film. Where Clare feels resigned to her fate, she attempts to make the most of her situation. It's a heartbreaking journey into the human mind and what it will do to survive – or keep from going insane. In certain scenarios it's impossible to tell if Clare is so deluded as to be sincerely happy or not, though these scenarios are of course interspersed with descents back into crippling despair.
The story is fairly simple; an Australian tourist is swept off her feet by a charming local in Berlin, staying with him for a couple of days before realising that she isn't allowed to leave.
Palmer's performance as Clare is so excellent that counterpart Max Riemelt can barely keep up, but keep up he does. His character, Andi, can be dashing, friendly and witty, or he can be sinister, cold and (perhaps most frightening) entirely unreadable. While director Cate Shortland surely deserves an enormous share of the credit, a scene I found simply remarkable is one where Andi suffers a loss and we as an audience are still able to feel sympathy alongside Clare for this monster of a human being.
Presumably borrowing the title from Stockholm Syndrome, the lines in the relationship of Andi and Clare do begin to blur throughout the film. Where Clare feels resigned to her fate, she attempts to make the most of her situation. It's a heartbreaking journey into the human mind and what it will do to survive – or keep from going insane. In certain scenarios it's impossible to tell if Clare is so deluded as to be sincerely happy or not, though these scenarios are of course interspersed with descents back into crippling despair.
The camera is a bit dark and really focuses on the drama, but it starts with a warm color because it wants to show the love story between the two, it shows the Berlin flair, a lot of nice and awesome places are captured, but until the end of the movie the camera is nothing else than a dark material which is great to show the drama which is happening.
The music is standard and nothing special actually in that moment, might be a bit disappointing, the effects are okay.
What's interesting is that we don't simply follow Clare for the duration of the film, but just as often see how Andi is spending his day. It's an interesting division of screen time that frequently has the audience seeing a scene from Andi's point of view as he arrives home; we wonder along with him what Clare has been up to while he's been gone. It's a strangely fun viewing experience watching him examine the apartment for anything amiss or askew.
The cinematography is great, the score fantastic. One thing I loved about the film was its ability to convey so much wordlessly. The two main characters are regularly away from each other, and these scenes are therefore obviously less reliant on dialogue. Despite this, we are able to see and almost breathe the raw, exposed emotion of the duo.
The flaws in this film lay with a couple of weird editing choices (at some point we seem to be misled as to whether a character is painting their own toenails or someone else is painting the toenails of a cadaver, for some reason, and elsewhere a flight of stairs and multiple apartments could absolutely have been less disorienting). Clare also has access to a kitchen, but never uses a knife in an escape attempt. Because of the exciting moment where she finds a screwdriver in an early scene, one would assume that the kitchen is knifeless… but we're never shown an empty drawer or anything to indicate a lack of knives. It just felt a little off.
The ending was disappointing; it manages to be both predictable and nonsensical, which isn't a great combination. I didn't let that ruin the film for me, though; Berlin Syndrome is a wonderful character-study and a psychological tornado of violence and suspense.
At the end I would say if you are a fan of that special kind of movie have fun and for the genre we have a good one which makes me giving it
8/10
but compared to all the other movies in that universe it might stop at
6/10
but still something I can recommend to you, especially when you look at the genre score.
Have fund watching movies, maybe also Berlin Syndrome and thanks a lot for reading.
0 comments:
Post a Comment