The White Sound

Hans Weingartner's first film follows Lukas, played by Daniel Brühl, into schizophrenia. He moves in with his sister, takes mushrooms with friends, and never quite comes back; the voices begin, first in the background and then everywhere. What the film does is not describe the illness from outside but place the audience inside Lukas's field of hearing. Through the sound design conversations blur, parts of sentences become unintelligible, and the hum underneath comes forward. That is exactly the white noise of the title. The hardest scenes end up being not the violent ones but ordinary kitchen conversations in which nobody's words can be made out. Brühl won Best Actor at the German Film Awards and Best Newcomer at the Bavarian Film Awards for the role, and his career began there. It opened in Germany on 31 January 2002. Who it is for: viewers interested in films that render mental illness through form, and in early Daniel Brühl. Who it is not for: anyone with no tolerance for punishing sound design, which the film applies deliberately and does not let up.