nekromantik

i'm supposed to be reviewing the blu-ray of nekromantik 2, but i hadn't seen nekromantik so i thought i'd try to watch both. here's what i thought of the first one.

i had a bit of an idea of what i was in for. a few years ago, i realised i was about to spend the night of my twenty-second birthday alone, so i decided to watch der todesking. der todesking is a kind of portanteau horror film about suicide and violent death, so perfect for watching alone on your birthday. it includes a segment in which a man kills himself by bashing his head repeatedly into his bedroom wall. it's great.

nekromantic is by the same filmmaker, jorg buttregeit. it's also a film about death. it's about bob, a guy who works for a cleaning firm that specialises in disposing of dead bodies. bob steals a corpse from a crime scene, takes it home to his girlfriend, betty, and together they fuck with it, literally. but when bob loses his job and betty leaves him, he is forced to seek other ways to satisfy his urges.

it's a film about necrophilia, obviously. except, it's more than that. it's about sex, and the relationship between sex and love and dependency. bob seems to need betty to be involved in the necrophilia for it to work, whereas the film makes it quite clear that betty doesn't need bob, only a corpse. it's about nature and the fact that really we're all just rotting meat. at the same time it's about the miracle of nature and of being alive and at times is actually kind of life affirming.

it also had a bit about jesus that i didn't get. and there's a moment in which it seems to be either criticising horror movies or challenging them. that was the thing, the tone bounces around all over the place and i could never tell whether buttgereit wants us to take this seriously or not. there are definitely comedic moments, and contrasting moments of depravity and horror, and yet at the same time some of the sex scenes are filmed in a way that suggests what is happening is supposed to be beautiful. is this a filmmaker fucking with his audience? or is he making the point that whatever we do in the bedroom, it's all the same at the end of the day. would he be laughing at me right now for over-thinking it? or cursing me for not looking into it deeply enough?

i don't know. i think jorg buttgereit is perhaps the german lars von trier. i can never tell whether von trier is fucking with me either.

whatever it all means, it has to be said that nekromantic features one of the greatest endings of all time. never before have i been so gloriously shocked by a moment in a film. it's the kind of moment that you can't stop watching even though you really want to turn away from the screen. i loved it.

onto the second one...