morrison-dylan-fan After finding The Age of Shadows to be an excellent choice,I took a look at the list of other titles set for the main part of the ICM Film Fest. Expecting all the Horror flicks to be limited to the "Horror section" of the fest,I was intrigued to spot a German Horror in the main line-up,which led to me getting set for a restless nights sleep.The plot:Returning from a rave with mates,Tina begins hearing strange sounds. Along with the noises, Tina starts to see a strange creature appear in all her dreams/nightmares. Telling mum and dad,Tina's family begin treating her for mental illness. As she loses all support and begins to experience a mental breakdown, the creature breaks out of Tina's dreams,and turns her reality into a nightmare.View on the film:Sculpting the movie over 13 years,writer/director/co-editor Akiz awakens Tina's nightmare with the abrasive use of strobe lighting and Rave music that stylishly crosses the line between Tina's dreams and reality. Filmed completely with natural light,Akiz gives the monster (who comes to life with terrific SFX) an impressive level of flexibility, with close-ups of the creatures face bringing out a warmth kept under wraps in the eerie wide-shots. Shaving into Tina's fragile mental state, Akiz explores her breakdown with darting tracking shots that enter the black hole of depression Tina is trapped in,with no sign of any family or friends putting their hands out to help. Joined by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon giving a good performance as Lehrerin, Carolyn Genzkow gives a terrific performance as Tina,with Genzkow appearing really at ease and natural when working with the creature SFX,and also getting under the fractured skin of Tina,whose partying outlook Genzkow peels away,as the nightmare destroys Tina's life. Blending dark horror fantasy with raw psychological drama,the screenplay by Akiz makes the genres feel ill at ease sitting next to each other. Leaving no room for ambiguity over the existence of the creature, Akiz gets Tina to take sudden leaps in logic,from her never attempting to capture the creature on camera, (despite playing with her mobile whilst around it a number of times) to leaving her room to call her parents to see the creature,instead of just calling them whilst in the room itself,where Tina's nightmare begins.

Invalid_ID_DI Against the indispensable backdrop of techno-psychedelic throbbing drug-infused party experiences, a teenage girl starts seeing a hyperstitional monster resembling a living-corpse embryo in her house, which wants to idle around, consume food and come closer to the girl. Alongside classical dynamism of sanity vs. craziness, there's an unique kind of isomorphism going on between the girl and monster — Tina is the monster and grows an attachment to it (when it's hurt, she feels the repercussions on her flesh and mind) — uncovering themes of self-image, uncertainty of pregnancy and relation to friends (especially the guy she has a crush on), making this a more intelligible coming-of-age film (she becomes 18). However the film is edited in a way to seem free and incomprehensible, in the sense that planes of reality, dream and perception are merged, such that for example scenes later in the film seem to occur as if those before didn't happen, vice versa, and so on. The hand-held camera always sweeps to make the viewer feel as a fellow party-goer or a ghost gliding next to the characters. The beginning already introduces a lot of ambiguity with its portrayal of a non-linear time disturbance that's very much related to plausible anxious visions happening on a reckless passionate party night, with its libidinal and death instincts, distinctive visceral flowing trajectories and trips, that fervently coalesce in this psychological rave film.

Perception_de_Ambiguity 17-year-old Tina keeps hearing and seeing a noisy food-craving creature at night that is sitting in the kitchen in front of the open fridge. Are they dreams, hallucinations, is the creature real or is Tina maybe already dead (she has a potentially fatal accident very early in the film)? She starts off being terrified by the creature but as she finds herself unable to have it leave her alone she gradually gets acquainted with it and basically learns to live with it. Does this mean that she is getting better or worse? Is she learning to conquer her fears or is she only falling deeper into the rabbit hole?This setup is far from unique, but the film feels incredibly fresh, bringing an authenticity to the proceedings that would be notable even for a straight drama, not just in the way the characters interact witch each other in the individual scenes but also in how the "plot" unfolds overall. It is also shot without the use of any artificial light, all hand-held (certainly not "shaky-cam", though) and doesn't seem to use any overdubbing for the dialogues either. What's particularly remarkable is that at the same time the film also is quite a visceral experience, thanks of course especially to the party scenes (which aren't that numerous) that are full of strobe lights and loud techno, but even beyond those scenes this "techno party feeling" that can in turns mean ecstasy or dizziness, bleeds to some extent through the whole film, creating an atmosphere somewhere in between 'Enter the Void' and 'Spring Breakers'. And even when things become quieter the film is paced in such a way that it always maintains a certain level of intensity.The creature itself (an extremely convincing sfx) is terrifyingly ugly yet once you actually start to look at it and get closer to it it is weirdly cute in its small size, pathetic looks, and its nonthreatening slowness. This creature design alone already makes Tina's very gradual embrace of this thing understandable.Occurrences involving the creature are presented as completely real, even though nobody else (primarily this concerns Tina's parents) get to see or hear it, and when they do seem to be able to see the creature or the results of its doings there always is some possibility that it might be the girl's own actions that they are reacting to. All this doesn't sound too original, but what helps the effectiveness of this, and what helps to keep the viewer doubting what's real and what isn't, is the fact that while it is clear that the film is told from a very subjective point of view, the way it is photographed give the images a certain sense of objectivity, the camera isn't particularly focused on its protagonist and the film is completely shot with wide lenses. This approach manages to lend a lot of credibility to the existence of the creature. I think a stylistic choice that perhaps best exemplifies this combination of subjective point of view and the sense of objective camera is when during a few of the party scenes the viewer can't actually make out the spoken dialogue, and instead they are shown through subtitles (yes, pretty much like the nightclub sequence in "Fire Walk With Me"). The impression this leaves is that the camera (or rather the sound equipment) isn't able to pick up the dialogue over the loud music, but at the same time we know that Tina can hear the dialogue. I'd also argue that subconsciously this suggests to a viewer that even though in this case the film fills us in on what we are missing, the images and sounds may sometimes be inadequate to capture Tina's experience. So as much as the camera tries to document everything, the film itself is limited in how much it can get to the core of its protagonist (each person is a mystery, after all). Likely you will end up with a puzzle with missing pieces and it's on you to make sense of that mystery.The following paragraph is more spoiler-y!!! Things are wisely left ambiguous even as the closing credits roll, even the extent of Tina's drug use is ambiguous, in retrospect I can't even remember seeing her have as much as a drink (well, a beer, maybe). Nevertheless it should be clear that she is a party girl who makes a lot of use of illegal substances which remain unnamed. 'Der Nachtmahr' does a good job of implying things rather than showing them without ever feeling vague. It would be too easy (and probably too reductive) to just write Tina off as a junkie who has lost her grip on reality. There are other aspects to her life that may have a lot of bearing on what Tina is going through. Perhaps most importantly there is a guy in her circle of friends that she is infatuated with, but even though he seems to quite like her too they don't quite get together and instead another girl keeps latching on to him. Naturally Tina hates her guts. From all the partying she probably also simply doesn't get as much sleep as she should and her relationship to her parents may also weight on her.Achim Bornhak is a dedicated artist who works in several fields and with 'Der Nachtmahr' he realized a passion project that was 13 years in the making. It started out as just a work on a sculpture (the creature), which lead to associations and a narrative, resulting eventually in this art-house genre film.

tatamiman Awesome film. I saw an excellent combination on the same evening, first a documentary titled Zen For Nothing, about a Swiss girl spending some 6 months at a zen monastery in japan. A very quiet film about finding yourself, some of the characters eventually experiencing a cathartic moment, letting their emotional demons out along the way, meditating, working or just chatting the rest of the time. I knew that Nachtmahr was going to be quite the opposite as I had read about the subject and the rave music and aggressive lights etc, but it was a total surprise to discover that it touched on a similar theme as the zen documentary.Of course the social environments are completely different and it is significant that Nachtmahr is about a teenager's emotional state and the two couldn't be stylistically more different, but nevertheless both films are about finding and asserting one's true self. I actually recommend watching the two as a sort of diptych as they really complement each other: on the one hand the silence, bells and zen chanting immersed in subdued natural winter light, on the other the wild aggressive rave beats and flashing colored electrical strobe lights. Apart from that, I really enjoyed the rave scenes, the visuals the structure or storytelling and the underlying humor as well as the "unpretentiousness" and obvious "not big budget productionness" of Der Nachtmahr. If you liked films like Morvern Callar, Aurora and David Lynch films, you'll like this.. It's not hard to find flaws if you're after the perfect festival winning movie but this film is not perfect and I loved that about it.