Horst in Translation ([email protected])
"Masks" is a German movie from 2011, so this one in the German language is already more than five years old. It runs for roughly 110 minutes and is among the more recent works by writer and director Andreas Marschall. This is the story of a young ambitious acting student who gets involved with a very dangerous link to the past. This one is about acting teacher Matteusz Gdula, a man who invented his own acting technique back in the day that had terrible consequences, not only for him, but also for his students. So there are more than just a few flashbacks in this one, even if the main character is without a doubt Susan Ermich's Stella. Chances are high you never heard of her as an actress and even I haven't. Same can be said about all the supporting players in here basically, the younger or the older. I see that the guy who plays the acting teacher regularly works with Helge Schneider. Good for him. As for Ermich, I thought she was pretty fine overall probably, definitely elevated the material at times and with this I am not just referring to the scenes when we see her topless. Sadly, this is not the case for all the actors in here. Some of the supporting players feel very stale, especially in their line delivers. Sadly, there is always a danger of something like this to happen in horror movies as the money frequently goes to effects rather than performers.Anyway, I think the film may be slightly too long for its own good. The longer it goes, the shoddier it becomes in terms of the script and focus. It is still kinda interesting early on with the introduction to the characters and the link to the past. The scene that actually involves the masks is also fairly decent, even if I am generally not too big on jump scares. But the weirdness and absurdity makes it work somehow. Afterward when the danger becomes much more human and not really that much about mysterious possibly supernatural elements anymore, the film is really extremely underwhelming. I found this especially disappointing as the build-up early on wasn't bad at all, also with the mysterious killings about people getting stabbed. All in all, it is a relatively generic horror movie. Not bad, but also nowhere near the best of the genre of the 2010s. There are weaknesses in story-telling as it is sadly so often the case with this genre, some nudity, even a slightly lesbian scene, a killer, lots of mystery, hot young girls, relatively incompetent males and in the center of it all a hot young blonde who is the key to all the mystery and strangely enough never gets focused by the killer(s), so she survives mysteriously until the very end. Will she also survive the film itself? Watch for yourself. Or don't if you are not into horror films. I give this one a thumbs-down. Not recommended.
