Written by Siegfried Kammi and Christian Alvart (adapted from Alberto Rodríguez’s and Rafael Cobo’s script for 2014’s Marshland)
Directed by Christian Alvart
Starring Trystan Pütter, Felix Kramer and Nurit Hirschfeld
Running time: 2 hours and 9 minutes
Language: German (and some French)
Unrated-Contains nudity, language, sex, violence, sexual violence, smoking and drinking

by Benjamin Leonard, Best Boy

This is another one where, going in, I knew very little about it. There’s missing teens, dead bodies, gritty detectives all set in a newly reunified East German small town. The trailer is in German with no subtitles. So there’s very little to be gathered there other than the overall aesthetic which, honestly, was almost good enough for me. The thing that pushed it over the edge to make me want to watch it was that it’s a recent remake of the Spanish film Marshland by Alberto Rodríguez. Now, I’d never seen that either, but a new language remake within 6 years is often a sign of a compelling story. From there, it’s all what the director (Christian Alvart) does with it. And, like I’d said, the look of the thing was to my tastes.

The story takes place in 1992 (a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall), in a remote East German town that has only recently started to feel the effects of the reunification. Two teen sisters have gone missing and the state has sent Patrick, a Western detective in (as punishment to him), to work with Markus, an Eastern colleague whom Patrick has never met. It’s easy to see upon their separate arrivals that the locals look down upon and distrust Patrick (Trystan Pütter) as an outsider, but they also seem to fear Markus (Felix Kramer).

The character dynamics are fun, if not a bit typical. Markus has a big, tough bad-cop image and seems very comfortable with the strong-arm methods he developed under the communist regime. He doesn’t see much of value in Patrick as a detective; he can neither fight nor shoot. What can he have to offer? But their relationship with each other is secondary to their individual relationships with the community they are trying to solve this crime in.

As the two start to gather information, they learn that the missing girls were known to be looking to leave for Berlin and also that they were very sexually active. This leads them in a couple different directions. There’s a young man known about town as “Handsome Charlie” that seems quite popular with the high school girls, but there's also a few different people that frequently travel between the town and Berlin. 

As they proceed to snoop around and chase down clues, they end up getting on just about everyone’s bad side. All of the locals are sick of them: the cops, the mob, the girls’ father and even some of the town’s young men whose girlfriends had also disappeared in recent years. That last bit, of course, gives them more clues. This wasn’t an isolated incident, which narrows their focus in some ways, but it expands it in others. Look. There’s a WHOLE lot of running around in circles as they try to solve this thing, but the real story we are watching unfold here is this town slowly moving towards its recent democratization. 

It’s a good enough story, and the characters are interesting with solid performances. The look that pulled me into watching was consistent and effective throughout the movie. At around the halfway mark, the score kinda crept into my consciousness rather than just adding to the overall film. More a brief moment I thought it was trying too hard to capture a True Detective vibe, but I shortly realized that that was actually a perfect representation. 

While I wouldn’t place this at the top of my list of films from Fantasia Fest this year, it is most certainly in the top two thirds. If you like gritty detective stories, post-cold war intrigue or the creepy True Detective vibe, this is well worth your time.

If you’re in Canada, it’s available On Demand via Fantasia Film Festival August 20th-September 2nd.