ANGST

Based on the disturbing case of Werner Kniesek, a man who committed multiple murders in a brief period of release from confinement, this movie captures the scheming of an anomic young man fresh out of prison. We are privy to his thoughts, his plans, his history, and his vision for his crimes as he goes from one potential victim to another, eventually winding up in an isolated-enough house where he terrorizes and systematically murders three members of a family. He leaves the scene of his crime, and heads into the world to wreak his larger vision upon the world.

I felt great after seeing this.

Though banned for its graphic violence, and long a hidden gem sought only by the most savvy and brave cult filmographers, this bleak and brutal film speaks way past the Video Nasty audience. It is tense, disgusting, scrupulously honest, and morally sound. It is also subtle but unflinching in capturing the vast gulf between a would-be murderer's narcissistic delusions and his abjectly pathetic reality. Erwin Leder is marvelous as the nameless antagonist, so far gone in his psychosis that he is at times too comically incompetent to realize the grandness of his psychotic visions, the cool and calculating sadism of his ongoing internal monologue constantly undercut by his external struggles with the dead weight of his victims, his hapless premature ejaculations, his complete and utter inability to even pass for normal at a glance. 

The movie is stylish but not showy. It is marvelously shot by Zbigniew Rybczyński (fresh off an Oscar win for his experimental short TANGO), who gives us maybe four looks in the movie that aren't vertigo-inducing crane shots or invasive close-ups. Tangerine Dream's Klaus Schulze underscores the thing with a menacingly percolating score. Gaspar Noe cited it as a strong influence (and one suspects Lars von Trier took notes, as well), but it's refreshing how devoid of post-modern irony the thing is. 

After binging horror franchises from Friday the 13th to Hannibal it was downright refreshing to watch a movie that flinched from neither the consequences of its psycho's crimes nor the confused dimensions of his humanity. Without finger-wagging or side-eying us it renders its verdict directly: this deranged asshole has a special plan for this world, and is to be kept away far away from everybody. Let us hope voters in November are as lucid.