Nightshade (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Nightshade |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1972 |
| length | 91 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Niklaus Schilling |
| script | Niklaus Schilling |
| production | Elke Haltaufderheide |
| music | Edvard Grieg |
| camera | Ingo Hamer |
| cut | Niklaus Schilling |
| occupation | |
| |
Nightshade is a German feature film from 1972.
action
A house is for sale in the Lüneburg Heath . Jan Eckmann from Hamburg is very interested. But the lonely owner is acting strange. The conversation is difficult. So it is midnight. Nevertheless, he accepts her offer and stays overnight. The mysterious resident named Elena Berg, dressed entirely in black, cast a spell over him irreversibly. He can hardly sleep. Not only did he watch her burn papers and clothes, he also had a room locked during the tour. And Elena didn't want to answer what the Mercedes convertible was about under the tarpaulin in the horse stable. Now the nocturnal noises and silent shadows do the rest.
Eckmann gets deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of dark secrets. He should have made a decision long ago - and go back to his job. But he stays one more night. This night is one nightmare. The beautiful Elena visits him in his room, but only to kiss his own grave like a messenger of death in his feverish fantasies. Eckmann is in shock and finds Elena a little later in the convertible, ready to give herself up to him, as if she had only been waiting for him here.
The house has become a trap for Eckmann. He is inextricably entangled in Elena's world. The next morning she is changed, suddenly wearing a transparent flower dress and wooing him like a happy lover. So they take a trip to the nearby moor lake. But the moor is life-threatening.
background
Skillfully using the north-west German heather and moor landscape as a backdrop, Schilling's film has two prominent precursors: the legendary film Fährmann Maria (1936) by Frank Wysbar and the homeland film Roses Bloom on the Heidegrab (1952), which is unusually dark for the time it was made .
Reviews
- Lexicon of international films : A man from the city travels to the Lüneburg Heath to buy a country house that is inhabited by a mysterious woman who remembers her deceased husband there. The hero becomes more and more entangled in a web of memories and mysterious apparitions that ultimately suggest that he is identical to the dead. In his cinema debut, Niklaus Schilling uses German homeland film sets for a subtle, aesthetically perfect horror film in the tradition of Murnau and Dreyer, not without irony.
- Die Zeit , January 19, 1973: the viewer is drawn ever closer into a fascinating sphere of magical irritation and a mysterious children's fairy tale threat, realized with very few subtle means. Horror and vampire motifs, longing for death and death in love: Schilling condenses this into an excursus about telling a story in film.
Awards
Nightshade had its world premiere in 1972 in the program of the International Forum for Young Films at the Berlinale . a. participated in the competition at the Locarno International Film Festival .
Web links
- Nightshade in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Nightshade at filmportal.de
- VISUALFilm review: Phantomkino
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nightshade. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 11, 2017 .
- ↑ Film tips . In: Die Zeit , No. 4/1973