Horst in Translation ([email protected])
This is "Anatomy", a German psychological thriller film from 15 years ago. It is actually one of the more known German movies abroad and it features Franka Potente playing the lead character briefly after her breakthrough in "Lola rennt". Looking at how long ago this was made, it is a bit surprising that so many actors in this film are actually still very popular today. This includes Benno Fürmann, Oliver Wnuk, Sebastian Blomberg, Anna Loos and maybe Rüdiger Vogler, who already worked in the 1970s with Wim Wenders. The writer and director is Stefan Ruzowitzky, from Austria. He won an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Feature category for "Die Fälscher" a while ago, but "Anatomie" or maybe also "Die Siebtelbauern" were his breakthrough films.Here we follow a young medicine student who gets accepted at a prestigious university, but quickly finds out that there are dark forces performing unethical experiments on a regular basis. The most interesting fact, however, is that these are not the real antagonists in this movie. It is more the radical wing of this group I just mentioned who are not scared of killing whenever and whomever they like. Now my general perception of this film is a double-edged sword. I liked parts of it and felt is was a decent thriller, but other parts I was not too fond of at all. This already starts with my perception that Fürmann, Loos and Wnuk are simply no talented actors in my opinion. Especially Loos did nothing for me here. Literally, the only reason why I felt she was in this film was to show her in the end when she was dead. Apart from that, Holger Speckhahn is not an actor by any means. Not even a good television show host, but even worse as an actor. Blomberg, who has more range, has been given a stupid role of a love interest to the main character that adds almost nothing to the film where he cannot put his talent on show at all. The only somewhat good thing was that you could wonder about basically every character in this film if he was good or bad and keep changing your opinion throughout the entire film repeatedly. For example, I was fairly certain that Loos' character would be actually evil and her friendship with Potente's character was just facade.Talking about Potente, she looks stunning in here and she is also maybe the best actor in this movie. Sad to see her career has gone south a lot since then. The ending credits include a nice German song names "Alles" ("Everything") and the refrain says something like "do you believe this was already everything?". This does not really make sense in terms of the story in this film, but it makes sense looking at the fact that Ruzowitzky made a sequel a couple years later. About this one here, I recommend it to fans of horror thrillers or fans of scalpel action, but everybody else can do without it. It's not half as good as it's famous.
