AFI Fest Report: Antibodies (Antikörper) Review
Another day, another festival, or so it seems ... Peter Martin has fed us things in the past and will be covering this year's AFI Festival in depth for us. Here's his first word ...
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AFI FEST 2005 gets underway in a little more than two weeks, but the press screenings have already started.
My first screening was a plunge into darkness.
Serial killer movies are the prostitutes of the thriller genre. Everybody's had a go, and it's difficult to imagine a fresh take that would make anybody misty-eyed, remembering their first time. German writer/director Christian Alvart tries mighty hard to defy expectations.
ANTIBODIES (Antikorper) begins with the violent arrest of multiple-murder suspect Gabriel Engel (Andre Hennicke). Alvart's direction of this sequence is sensational -- nightmarish night-time setting in a low-rent apartment complex, booming shotgun blasts, SWAT team unleashing automatic gunfire, a naked man nearly escaping before smashing through glass, and a fair amount of blood.
The movie takes an abrupt left turn into daylight drama as we're introduced to Michael Martens (Wotan Wilke Moehring), a farmer who is also his village's part-time policeman. Martens has been obsessed for months with finding the killer of a local girl who was friendly with his troubled son, and his single-minded pursuit has disturbed some of the locals.
With the news that Engel has confessed to the rape and murder of 13 young boys, Martens concludes that he
might have killed the local girl. The devoutly religious Martens is haunted by nightmares and inattentive to the needs of his wife, young daughter, and especially his bed-wetting son, who is beginning to display deviant behavior. Things only get worse for Martens when serial killer Engel quickly warms to the inexperienced cop and decides he will only talk to him.
Alvart definitely has potential as a director (this is his second feature film); what at first seems to be an patchwork of uncertain camera movements (veering between the static and the cliched) and wildly overripe performances slowly coagulates into a crazy-quilt pattern suitable to the two main characters. Engel is obviously insane, yet as played by Andre Hennicke (who sympathetically embodied a tortured director in Oskar Roehler's ANGST a couple of years ago), he maintains an edge of reason, all the better so that he can push Martens over the edge. Martens begins as an ill-defined, blandly "good" character, but as the story progresses he slowly becomes unhinged, and the viewer is left to wonder if Martens will follow Engel into madness.
Where writer/director Alvart stumbles is in telegraphing certain plot points too early in the narrative, and in maintaining a too-deliberate pace. It becomes obvious where the story is heading, and it's a bit exasperating to wait 137 minutes to confirm one's suspicions. It doesn't help that some of the sequences are far too predictable, especially the central "cat and mouse" jailhouse conversations between Engel and Martens that follow the SILENCE OF THE LAMBS pattern too closely (and, no, self-consciously referring to Hannibal Lector doesn't grant one the license to copy).
Still, for those who can't get enough serial killer movies, it's worth seeing, simply for the unusual variation on a theme. It doesn't yet have US distribution. When it played at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Richard Brunton reported the director's comment that it may be remade, so why not see the original? (If you follow that link you can also read Richard's more positive review.)
ANTIBODIES will be playing at AFI FEST on Saturday, November 5 at 8:45 pm and Monday, November 7, at 12:30
pm.
Review by Peter Martin
