The Free Will

Theo is released after nine years in psychiatric detention, where he was held for brutally assaulting and raping three women. He moves into supervised housing, gets on well with his social worker, finds work at a print shop and even begins a relationship with Nettie. On the surface everything is holding together. The rage inside him has gone nowhere, and the film does not let you forget that for a moment. Matthias Glasner treats the subject as neither an excuse nor a simple moral lesson, and works to keep the distance between looking from inside a perpetrator and justifying him. Jürgen Vogel, who co-wrote the screenplay and plays Theo, won a Silver Bear at Berlin in 2006. It runs one hundred and sixty-three minutes and it is hard to sit through.