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.
Stars:
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.
Details
Release Date:
20 April 2017 (Australia)
Also Known As:
Berlin Syndrom
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 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.
