Starts of the week: which films are worthwhile – and which are not – culture

A dark song

Sofia Glasl: The premise is as simple as it is effective: two strangers lock themselves in a run-down mansion to practice an occult ritual that will last several months. The religion teacher Sophia is determined to speak to her deceased son again. The black magician Joseph shuffles in swollen and disheveled and wants to see money first. Under a gimmicky direction, “A Dark Song” would have become a mixture of “Big Brother” and “Jungle Camp”. The Irishman Liam Gavin turns it into an oppressive chamber play that touches on topics such as depression, domestic violence, loss and alcoholism with impressive mastery and conjures up the psychological horror of the two.

The House

Nicolas Freund: In the near future, Germany will be ruled by right-wing populists and the journalist Johann (Tobias Moretti) has made many enemies by exposing a political scandal. He does what journalists do in such a situation: With his wife Lucia (Valery Tscheplanowa), who has to contest large parts of the film naked, he has retired to a chic smart home in the Swedish archipelago. But the villa doesn’t seem to offer any safe refuge either: the in-house AI locks doors without being asked, the refrigerator orders far too many supplies and of course everything is recorded anyway. According to a short story by the journalist Dirk Kurbjuweit, director Rick Ostermann filmed a film that wants to bring everything together: a crisis of democracy with relationship problems and artificial intelligence. That’s a bit much for the exactly 90-minute television film format. The link between flawed AI and democracy is also more misleading than revealing.

Backland

Fritz Göttler: One finger was left on the dead man, all the others and the toes were cut off. A brutal serial killer, Tatort Wien, after the end of the First World War. The city is gloomy and battered, its people are damaged, physically and mentally. Stefan Ruzowitzky let the actors act in front of the blue screen, the backgrounds were later inserted by computer, they are as oblique and crooked as those of the Caligari cinema. Murathan Muslu is Commissioner Perg, who was a Russian prisoner of war and has now returned home. His ideals are perdu, and he realizes that he is more involved in the killer affair than expected.

High forest

Philipp Stadelmaier: Mario (Thomas Prenn), a dancer from South Tyrol, survived an Islamist attack in a gay bar in Rome; his friend, from the same village as him, dies. This is followed by accusations by homophobic backwoodsmen, encounters with good Muslims and flight into heroin. Eva Romens Debut film tries in vain to combine the too limited (mountain village) with the too big issues (Islam, terror). The result is shrill, moralizing and fuzzy.

Nowhere Special

Anke Sterneborg: At the latest when the four-year-old son hands his father the 35th candle for the chocolate cake on his 34th birthday, which he no longer needs, the spectator becomes soft. John, played unusually rough by the sonny boy James Norton, is a window cleaner in a small Northern Irish town and a single father who wants to find a loving adoptive family for his young son in the last few months he has left. The producer and occasional director Uberto Pasolini (“Mr. May and the Whisper of Eternity”) succeeds in narrating this drama in a very intimate and touching way, but free from sentimentality.

The Sparks Brothers

Anke Sterneborg: “There is Marc Bolan playing with Adolf Hitler” is said to have exclaimed John Lennon when he saw the Sparks for the first time on television. Brothers Ron and Russell Mael were never mainstream, but have released 25 albums to date and are consistently influential. If you don’t know it, you can enjoy the documentary as mockumentary fun, with a good dose of absurdity, fantasy and a weird sense of style. The same qualities that the films of Edgar Wright such as “Shaun of the Dead” or “Baby Driver”. Maybe the Sparks, who drove falsetto singing to excess long before Freddie Mercury, will finally get as well known as they deserve.

Diary of a bee

Doris Kuhn: Live side by side with bees in the hive, hum over the forest and meadows – thanks to lush camera tricks, what is otherwise known from animation films becomes real. Dennis Wells relies on personal closeness, he turns a bee into the main character, who explains her everyday life in a soft voice. There is no teaching about ecosystems or human dangers, the information is packed into adventure and practically experienced in a flyby. That works, after that everyone wants to be a friend of the bees.

Titans

Juliane Liebert: Not a film for the faint of heart, but one for romantics of a completely different kind. The French director Julia Ducournau won the Palme d’Or in Cannes this year. It tells the story of Alexia, a young woman who becomes a serial killer as a child after a car accident. She kills anyone who gets too close to her and has sex with cars on the side. Her copulation with a Cadillac is one of the less absurd scenes of “Titane”, or rather: just the beginning. An intense, extremely brutal film about pain, body and the beauty of love.

Daughters

Fritz Göttler: The sick father wants to be chauffeured to Switzerland to die by the daughter, played by Alexandra Maria Lara. She can only do it if her best friend comes along, that’s Birgit Minichmayr. Because the father is Josef Bierbichler, will Nana Neuls Film is not a simple one-day trip, it first goes to Lake Maggiore, the father’s great love, and from there the two women continue on an unpredictable trip to self-discovery, through narrow Italian old town streets and to a Greek island. Then this is the right place where you can find your father again …

The wild forest

Martina Knoben: The Bavarian Forest National Park was founded 50 years ago. Nature is largely left to its own devices, including dead wood from windthrow and bark beetles. Archive recordings in this documentary show that not everyone liked it at the time. In the meantime, however, the longing for wilderness has apparently become huge. Lisa Eder celebrates the “wild forest” with all the means of nature photography, and its protagonists also agree that humans need such forests. A film like a relaxed hike with lots of great views – a little more “wildness” would have done the documentary good.

Wonders of the Sea

Sarah Zapf: Kidnapped in the documentary Jean-Michel Cousteau, Son of the legendary marine research pioneer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, into the fascinating underwater world of our oceans. Colorful and detailed images of the aquatic flora and fauna from the Fiji Islands to the Bahamas are shown. The expeditions of Cousteau and his children are not only intended to bring the beauty of this unique ecosystem closer, but also to highlight its enormous endangerment. Arnold Schwarzenegger takes on the narrative role. Worth seeing, but can’t keep up with really outstanding nature documentaries.