Berlin Syndrome | Little White Lies

Berlin Syn­drome

06 Jun 2017 / Released: 09 Jun 2017

Words by Caitlin Quinlan

Directed by Cate Shortland

Starring Lucie Aron, Max Riemelt, and Teresa Palmer

A young woman with long dark hair, wearing a brown jacket, jeans, and a backpack, stands in a subway station next to a yellow train.
A young woman with long dark hair, wearing a brown jacket, jeans, and a backpack, stands in a subway station next to a yellow train.
3

Anticipation.

Cate Shortland thrives when exploring the subtleties of stories. Will a thriller ruin that?

4

Enjoyment.

Edge-of-your-seat stuff for the majority of the film.

3

In Retrospect.

An intelligent tale with unusual undertones and a necessary fear factor.

A hol­i­day fling turns into a wak­ing night­mare in Cate Shortland’s tense roman­tic thriller.

When it comes to screen depic­tions of preda­to­ry men, Aus­tralian direc­tor Cate Short­land has you cov­ered. Som­er­sault from 2004 is about an Aussie teen run­away dis­cov­er­ing her sex­u­al­i­ty, and 2012’s Lore, set dur­ing the fall of the Third Reich sees the eldest daugh­ter of an SS offi­cer pro­tect her sib­lings on a jour­ney across Ger­many. Both films share dis­tinct themes with her lat­est, Berlin Syn­drome. Inde­pen­dent yet trou­bled female lead? Check. Dan­ger­ous expe­ri­ences with creepy guys? Dou­ble check.

Adapt­ed from the 2011 nov­el by Melanie Joost­en, the film seems a lit­tle heavy hand­ed for Shortland’s soft­er, more poised film­mak­ing style, but she man­ages to deliv­er a lay­ered and con­sid­ered sto­ry amid all the ter­ror. Tere­sa Palmer plays Clare, a young back­pack­er who has bare­ly spent 48 hours in Berlin before she meets Andi (Max Riemelt), a high school Eng­lish teacher.

Their night of pas­sion becomes the one night stand from hell as her sud­den­ly obses­sive and vio­lent lover holds her hostage in his apart­ment. The aban­doned build­ing appears to have no escape, which Clare dis­cov­ers in a num­ber of grip­ping attempts to reach safe­ty. Palmer and Riemelt deliv­er impres­sive per­for­mances – their ini­tial chem­istry is what makes the even­tu­al dread so unnerv­ing, and the direc­tor expert­ly weaves romance and hor­ror togeth­er to delve into a more intri­cate thriller narrative.

Scenes are loaded with indi­ca­tors of threat ear­ly on, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing Clare and Andi’s first flir­ta­tious con­ver­sa­tions. Walk­ing through a qui­et, sub­ur­ban neigh­bour­hood, Clare is scared by the loud and abrupt bark­ing of a dog before find­ing a plas­tic wolf mask on the ground. She play­ful­ly laughs o both sym­bol­ic occur­rences. She then cor­rects Andi’s Eng­lish when he tells her he likes to com­pli­cate life”, mis­tak­ing the verb for con­tem­plate”. Alarm bells are ring­ing loud and clear. The moments aren’t as sub­tle as they could be, and both Som­er­sault and Lore are more del­i­cate­ly nuanced works that offer a bet­ter show­case of Shortland’s unique skills.

It’s impor­tant for Berlin Syn­drome, how­ev­er, that it clear­ly merges a sense of lust and fear in the same frame. This makes Clare’s occa­sion­al alle­giance to her cap­tor more under­stand­able, despite seem­ing incom­pre­hen­si­ble from a dis­tance. Extreme close-ups of bruised skin and dirty fin­ger­nails trans­mit an eerie sense of tex­ture and tac­til­i­ty, bind­ing us tight­ly to the minute details of the protagonist’s expe­ri­ence. We are close to Clare in instances of both vio­lence and inti­ma­cy – they draw us into her inter­nal con­flict. Moody ten­sion grad­u­al­ly devel­ops into unset­tling fear.

Occa­sion­al­ly the film feels a lit­tle overblown, detract­ing from the sus­pense at the wrong moments, but it is most­ly a well-craft­ed and intense. The cou­ple are com­pli­cat­ed; Andi is by no means exon­er­at­ed, but small­er details, such as his rela­tion­ship with his father, build up the psy­cho­log­i­cal strug­gles that dom­i­nate the film (and are also sug­gest­ed in its title). Stock­holm or Berlin, Short­land crafts her char­ac­ters and finds space in the mud­dling of seduc­tion and ter­ror. She exam­ines the inten­si­ty of human inter­ac­tions and how the fine line between our joy and deep inse­cu­ri­ty can spi­ral out of control.

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