Friday, September 08 11:45 AM PARAMOUNT 1
When I noticed that there was a large movie-shaped hole in Friday morning (any time before noon is morning to me, okay?) I conspired to fill it. This was the only movie that looked even halfway interesting that fit in the hole.
That being said, why wouldn't I jump at a chance to watch an award-winning German exorcism movie? Why relagate it to the pile of "watch if there's nothing better on" movies? Going in, I was hoping I'd picked a hidden winner, a movie far better than it sounded. Hey, it had happened before!
The first thing you see in the movie is the "this is a fictional movie based on actual events" warning. There are no special effects, no "shocking scenes", this is not a Hollywood exorcism movie. Instead, every moment of the movie seems crafted to make you _believe_ in what you're seeing. To make you disregard the notice that started the film, and believe that this is as close to an actual account of events as they happened. And it most definitely achieves that. It's a very realistic portrayal of a first-year university student, so normal and unremarkable that it goes right into ho-hum boring. I have no doubt at all that this is more-or-less what happened, because why would anyone tell such a simple and mostly unremarkable tale if it weren't true?
It does slowly transmute into an 'exorcism' movie from a 'day in the life of' movie as it goes along, and by the end of the movie you've definitely decided for yourself whether it was an actual case of posession or 'merely' mental illness (and each to their own on this one, there's no beating you over the head with what the director or scriptwriter has decided is the truth, not at all!), and it's well made and acted, so why isn't this a really great movie in my opinion? Why is it, IMO, not worth any awards?
Because it falls into the chasm between two good locations. It could have been a really good documentary on what actually happened. Most definitely, the story is there. As a documentary, I would have rated it highly. Or, it could have been a great fictional account of possession and exorcism. Most certainly, I would have enjoyed that and rated it highly. At the end of the day, it is obviously not a documentary (any resemblance to persons living or dead being purely co-incidental, this is not a documentary) and contains no definite fictionalized material, so it falls into the chasm of "why bother?" and "what was the point here?".
It might be just me. This could be a fantastic example of modern German cinema. Theoretically. I doubt it, though.