He’s a Collector: Shortland Returns to Germany for Simmering Psychological Thriller
Australian director Cate Shortland, most revered for her 2013 sophomore feature Lore, returns once more to Germany for her latest film, Berlin Syndrome, this time in a more contemporary climate adapting from a novel by Melanie Joosten. A one night stand suddenly turns deadly for an Australian woman traveling abroad on her own, which morphs into a sinister test of mental endurance as she’s forced to be his subservient mistress shuttered inside an abandoned apartment complex. The title is an allusion to the psychological phenomena known as Stockholm syndrome, wherein a captive develops a special bond with his or her captor. Shortland’s film features a subtext specific to the locale which informs the film’s suggestive undercurrent (as well as an angle of explanation for the antagonist’s historical/cognitive profile). Despite the potentially unique perspectives, both as Shortland’s approach to a familiar genre scenario and as an outsider’s examination of Berlin’s past traumas, a purposefully frustrating but prolonged middle section stretches the film’s running time unnecessarily, particularly since the scenario demands an inevitably limited options of resolution.
Stopping off in Berlin to photograph East German architecture as she travels the country, Australian tourist Clare (Teresa Palmer) has a chance encounter with Andi (Max Riemelt), a handsome local who strikes up an immediate rapport with the solo traveler. Instantly smitten with the unassuming school teacher after an erotic one night stand, Clare delays her journey to Dresden to spend just a little more time with Andi, but suddenly finds herself captive in his isolated apartment complex. As time goes by and after numerous failed attempts at escape, Clare discovers she isn’t the first woman Andi has trapped.
The cinema knows no limits when it comes to films examining women (particularly white ones) confined by their male captors. Superficially, Berlin Syndrome could easily be compared to William Wyler’s later period title The Collector (1965), in which Terence Stamp collects young women as an extension of his array of butterflies he obsessively amassed as a youth. On the other hand, Shortland’s film falls short of having the sort of complex depths of something like Jack Garfein’s 1964 title Something Wild, wherein rape victim Carroll Baker eventually falls in love with the passive captor played by Ralph Meeker.
At the center of this harrowing piece is another laudable performance from Teresa Palmer, an actress who seems attracted to dark, subversive material (compare her here to recent turns in everything from Fabrice du Welz’s Message from the King to Malick’s Knight of Cups to studio fodder like Lights Out and you’ll see a tantalizing range of performance and expression).
We aren’t given too many details about her character prior to her captivity, other than she’s a woman seeking to live in the moment and looking to pursue her dreams of publishing a photography book on GDR architecture. These details become tantamount to the film’s overall motif hinted in the title, for she eventually becomes a slave to the very structures she’s naively curious about, while Andi, despite his distaste for women and the politics of communist era East Germany, ends up creating his own personal dictatorship. In order for these themes to work, it seems characterization was a bit compromised, particularly concerning the rather vague explanation for Andi’s motivations to kidnap foreign tourist women as solely the result of being abandoned by his mother as a child.
Sequences with Andi’s father (Matthias Habich) don’t reveal enough about his psyche and his actual relationship with the world, and the unwieldy sequences slow the brooding tension (unlike, say, a brief but effective sequence where he demeans a female colleague at a party). Screenwriter Shaun Grant is no stranger to murderous tendencies (2011’s Snowtown), but DP Germain McMicking (Dead Europe, 2012) should receive notice for making so many sequences set within the same confined space look vibrant, fresh, and perpetually ill-boding.
Reviewed on January 20th at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival – World Dramatic Competition Programme. 116 Min.
★★★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
