Angst

An Austrian horror film. A man is released from prison. He has spent years inside; the release is granted, and the moment he steps through the gate the only thing he is thinking about is killing again. The narrative runs entirely inside his head. The inner voice talks without stopping: what he feels, his childhood, what he has tried and what did not work. The voice never falls silent, and that is the truly unbearable part of the film. He takes a taxi, then enters a house outside the city. There is a family in the house. From there the film moves into a long, unbroken passage of violence. It is not built as excitement; the man is inept, his plan does not hold, things keep going wrong, and the scene becomes harder to take because of it. The camerawork is the film's signature. The cinematographer Zbigniew Rybczyński used rigs attached to the character; the camera sits on the man, moves with him, and cuts between that and long overhead shots. The music is by Klaus Schulze. The source is a real case. The film takes off from an incident in Austria at the end of the 1970s and follows its details closely. On release it was banned or cut in many countries; it was rediscovered years later and its influence acknowledged. Gaspar Noé has said he treats it as a starting point for his own work. Erwin Leder plays the lead. Gerald Kargl directed; he made no other film. Who it is for: anyone curious about the far edge of cinema, watching for its place in history. Who it is not for: almost everyone. The film shows the violence to the end and leaves the viewer no way out.