Hell [DVD]

I have to say that I was supremely impressed by this German movie. You can imagine these events taking place a few years before the setting of The Road and the movie does spark thoughts along these lines.
In a desolate wasteland (Germany I assume, as there are no indications as to locale), and in searing daytime heat, a trio of travellers (1 man & 2 x sisters) are endeavouring to reach mountainous areas where they believe they will find water. En-route they pick up another young man at a disused garage. The foursome head for the hills. The movie details the one "obstacle" that they encounter (and which links back to the opening scene of the movie). To describe the "obstacle" would be to spoil the movie. Scary, gripping, thoughtful, the subtitles do not detract in any way from the impact of the film.
Thoroughly good movie that will stay with you after the credits have rolled. Highly recommended.

This is a post apocalyptic film set in Germany sometime in the future. The sun has scorched the earth, to the point where the ecology of the planet is falling apart. The fields are brown the forest have been burnt and the roads are littered with carcasses of dead animals. The search for food and water is the only thing that the survivors are interested in, that and not being attacked or killed by other survivors.

Into this mix are introduced Marie (Hannah Herzprung) and her sister Leonie who are travelling with erstwhile boyfriend Phillip. They have an old Volvo and have put blackouts on the windows to shield them selves from the rays and heat of the sun. Their aim is to head to the mountains as they have heard that you can still find water there. The supplies and fuel is running low when they hit a petrol/gas station. Only thing is someone is already there.

This is a film that is quite bleak and has constant tension running through out, in an almost unsettling way. The road trip soon runs into problems and once the extent of their situation becomes apparent, there is no going back. This is billed as a Roland Emmerich (`The Day After Tomorrow' and `2012'), but this is actually not like them at all, which is a very good thing. There is no over the top CGI, and the violence is not gratuitous, this trades on the psychological tension which means the audience does not have to have things spelled out for them.

It is in German with very good sub titles and runs for 86 minutes. Some will say it has echoes of `The Road', but it is a film in its own right and whilst it may not be the most original plot ever, it is certainly entertaining.

The marketing might make much of Roland Emmerich producing involvement, but while this low-budget German survivor story is set the day after tomorrow but it's about as far from The Day After Tomorrow as you can get. The sun is flaring and Earth's temperature has risen ten degrees. A group of survivors, led by tough Marie (Hannah Herzsprung), make their way toward the mountains, toward water.

As with John Hillcoat's The Road, this is a tale about the day-to-day fight for survival after a nameless cataclysm has befallen the planet. But while Hillcoat's film was perennially chilly, writer-director Tim Fehlbaum's is all about the lethal glare of the sun. The conceit of the characters having to avoid direct sunlight seems like an affectionate nod to Kathryn Bigelow's vampire classic Near Dark. It adds an intriguing extra dimension to many scenes.

The film begins as a fairly standard waste-crawler, but gradually turns into a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style nightmare, as Marie and her sister find themselves the prisoners of a ghastly family, led by a monstrous matriarch, horribly rational and literal in her attempts to ensure her family's survival.

Fehlbaum draws impressive intensity from the actors and delivers a series of tense set-pieces. In the final act I feared events would lurch into torture porn territory, but on the contrary, it's at this point that the films characters properly emerge, and the humanity of the piece comes to light. What could have been a film about cannibalism is actually about sisterhood.

On a technical level, the film is well shot. But the editing is at times of the chaotic variety: needless rapid cutting. I guess this technique is meant to bring across the thrill and confusion of the moment, but for me the filmmaker is giving us a sense of the experience at the expense of us actually understanding what's going on. Not a trade worth making, in my opinion.

There's nothing much new in Hell, but as a refined, engrossing amalgamation of well-worn ideas, it hangs together nicely, all the way up to the disappointingly sudden ending.