This wants to be a movie about our Germany, according to its screenwriter "Faserland". It tells of a policeman (Roland Zehrfeld), who prefers to swap his uniform for a full-body teddy bear costume to finally have a feeling of comfort that his girlfriend (Sandra Hüller), the grim and bourgeois documentary filmmaker, does not provide; of a lonely woman (Margit Carstensen) in a nursing home and her neurotic foot care provider (Michael Maertens), of her adult son (Bernhard Schütz), whose wife (Corinna Harfouch) and grandson Maximilian.
Blasé people who prioritize aesthetic existence over ethical; a teacher and his students on a class trip to a concentration camp memorial; and of a hermit and his raven. Germany meets us as an educational province, as a social and therapy station, as a historical workshop, as a country with hygiene awareness, as a desert of love with people of good taste, healthy self-hatred, and a sick mental state.
Frauke Finsterwalder, the director, and her husband, the writer Christian Kracht, have a neo-realism in mind, which would be equally right or wrong to call subversive, as it would be to speak of irony. However, the sharpness and depth of field of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" cannot hardly be applied to Federal Republic of Germany's everyday monstrosities, and Ulrich Seidl's Austro-analyses only fit to a limited extent.
After an hour, one feels bored by all the bizarre elements, then the interest awakens in the many wrong movements of the characters, which lead to terrible or horribly wrong directional changes and consequential decisions. Suddenly, there is a cutting pain, an abrupt shock, a great emptiness that temporarily lifts the glossing, caricaturing, and mocking nature of the film.
"Finsterworld" is available on DVD: https://www.alamodefilm.de/medium/detail/finsterworld.html
