Der Knochenmann

An austrian thriller that is quite off beat, but also very good. If you like your thriller to let you figure things out, but also have believable characters that are also very weird, you could do worse than this. Actually Josef Hader has quite a fan base, because of his dry style and humor.

This movie cherishes in that. You can't be squeamish either with this though, and while it has a glimpse of nudity, it also has cold blooded violence in there too, which you might find more disturbing (no pun intended). Then again, the movie does not shy away from trying to shock you, but only sporadically. Which works better, because it is rather slow paced and feels like it's holding back ... until the punches reign in.

One awaits a crime thriller that closely follows the book by Wolf Haas and has many intelligent gags but the the viewer is then overwhelmed by a great masterpiece that works on many levels - a sarcastic thriller not unlike Fargo, dark humour, amazing photography that reveals some Austrian reality, an intelligent plot with cool twists, great acting, ironic social criticism etc. This movie is in a row with the Kottan series, Indien, the other Brenner-movies of course, Slumming etc. and reassures one that although Qualtinger is dead his humour is not gone. When viewing this film one gets almost sad by realizing how good Austrian cinema can be, but there is not much support for filmmakers in Austria. I have no idea if this movie can work in a translation, but its worth a try.

The great thing about crime novels is that they can take all the liberty they want to portray the problems of a society without being perceived as heavy handed, too intellectual or unpatriotic, as they can conveniently embed their criticism in the context of the crime story.

Wolf Haas' novels are by no means any exception to this rule. At a constantly high quality he manages to tell his detective stories drawing a bleak portrait of a hypocritical and morally rotten Austrian middle class with the cynical humour typical for that nation.

As with all Wolf Haas film adaptations so far, the acting in this one is first rate. Especially Josef Hader pulls off an even better version of the likable but chronically downtrodden detective Brenner. However, also some side characters such as the Löschenkohl impress with their performance.

As for the film itself, it unfortunately has a few deadbeat moments and some dialogues that move too slowly and are on the fringe of getting boring. Some scenes might also be considered as being more violent than necessary. Certain characters such as the Russian mobsters are too stereotypical to be really enjoyable.

However, the movie also features great dark humour throughout and finishes off with a furious and really enjoyable ending. Overall, I'd highly recommended it if you are into cynical society satire.

Nice thriller for your movie nights. It has high class acting above all, especially of the lead role and some very convincing moments, pretty scary. Movie has a problem with very long shots and too trivial dialogs. Movie plot has been made in a completely tense rhythm but then we have slow pace dialog scenes where characters are telling YES or NO for several times. I am not sure if this is the nature of the language or local dialect in that particular part of Austria, but when reading the foreign subtitles that looks pretty dull. I might go and try to find some other films of the main lead cause I think he is pretty good. All in all, I would recommend this film.

If you watch this movie and use subtitles only is that this movie is a very dark comedy with lots of word puns in between which are close to being untranslatable, hence the rating differences we can see here. Overall an excellent movie but if you watch it as a foreign speaker with subtitles only you miss out the subtile humor in the dialogs which probably then results in some weird subtitles like constant yes and nos which probably resmble the local Austrian dialect word Eh which is not quite the same and if applied in the correct situations and Haders down to the bottom intonation quite humorous. This is probably one of those many things which are lost in the translation. As for the main actor Josef Hader he is actually a comedian and one in the dark austrian humor tradition which is close to the English humor. He has done a handful of movies and all of them are worth watching. This movie is the third of a series of criminal movies. The first one being komm süsser tod - come sweet death, and the second one being silentium. The first one is the one which could be considered to be the most humorous of the three, while the secod one being the one with the least humor. Der Knochenmann - the bone man is somewhere in between those two but with the most extreme things going on.