The Colli­ni Case

Fab­rizio Colli­ni (Fran­co Nero) enters busi­ness­man Hans Meyer’s (Man­fred Zap­at­ka) hotel room and shoots him in the head three times before mak­ing his way towards the hotel lob­by, leav­ing behind foot­prints stained with rem­nants of brain matter.

When con­front­ed by the recep­tion­ist, he sober­ly responds: ​“He’s dead. Pres­i­den­tial suite,” with a tone so vacant that she wouldn’t be sur­prised if he’d fol­lowed it up by order­ing an espres­so. The ensu­ing court­room dra­ma cen­tres around Cas­par Leinen (Elyas M’Barek), a novice attor­ney who accepts his first case to defend an unre­spon­sive Colli­ni, whose refusal to speak fuels the search for a motive.

A con­vo­lut­ed con­flict of inter­est begins to unfold when Leinen dis­cov­ers that the vic­tim was the man who had tak­en him in as his bene­fac­tor and nur­tured his law career. What fol­lows is a series of visu­al­ly strik­ing yet incon­sis­tent flash­backs that estab­lish a father-son rela­tion­ship between the two, before unveil­ing Meyer’s murky past in a his­tor­i­cal appraisal of the dark­est peri­od in Ger­man history.

Despite some slick cin­e­matog­ra­phy, a suit­ably var­ied colour scheme and effec­tive use of wide shots, the film’s dra­mat­ic atmos­phere suf­fers from awk­ward edit­ing choic­es, heavy-hand­ed music cues and a for­mu­la­ic screen­play. In the third act, how­ev­er, a series of twists that cri­tique the mod­ern Ger­man establishment’s com­pla­cen­cy towards post­war legal manip­u­la­tions ele­vate the script beyond the cliché-rid­den first two acts.

The Colli­ni Case rais­es some com­pelling ques­tions regard­ing the muta­bil­i­ty of law and the polit­i­cal tem­pera­ment of rigid insti­tu­tions. Fran­co Nero poignant­ly con­veys Fab­rizio Collini’s con­fronta­tion of the sub­dued trau­mas of war, albeit often through his eyes alone. On the oth­er hand, shots of Elyas M’Barek punch­ing air in a box­ing ring over melo­dra­mat­ic music serve only to obfus­cate the narrative.