I do not identify with screenplays or stage plays made with formulas and AI recipes. I respect them and, if they result in good cultural consumption products, I enjoy them. But I avoid them whenever I can. I prefer looser and open stories and structures that resist formulaic interpretations and academic approaches: those products that draw on various sources. When someone goes to see a play that I have written or directed, they find the confluence of cabaret theatre, street theatre, Brecht, Greek tragedy, pamphlets, melodrama and other influences that I cannot even identify.
That is how I felt when I watched the first feature film by German director Mareika Wegener, released in 2022, with no awards from anywhere (according to IMDb) and forgotten, but it is a fascinating, haunting, and beautiful first work, in which policewoman Saskia Harder (played by Soviet actress Valery Tscheplanowa) accepts a position in the town of Friedland during her recovery, after surviving a bomb blast in Afghanistan, where she was training local female fighters.
Officer Harder must identify the remains of a mummified young girl, whose hands are missing. What follows is a happy encounter between a police investigation plot, Friedland legends about a forest and a moor, echoes of the Second World War in the form of an unexploded bomb dropped by the Allies which has to be detonated in the moat surrounding the castle of the local landowner, who treasures a macaw called Munchkin and beautiful works of art, both his own and that of his little daughter Beate, who disappeared in the forest when she was 11, never to be seen again; the intervention of the teenage brother of another missing girl, to put an end to the daily drama he experiences with his parents and who seems to be guided by a mysterious loose stallion; and Greek mythology, through the introduction, from the prologue in Afghanistan, of the nymph Echo, one of the Oreads who was condemned by the goddess Hera (Zeus' sister and wife) to repeat everything she hears (the reason why is a long gossip, like all those tales of Olympus), who whenever she is going to manifest herself she does so amidst a cloud of fuchsia smoke, which --to round out the package-- reminded me of Lovecraft and his story "The Color of Outer Space."
One of the things I liked most about «Echo» was its ending, which made me burst out laughing when the debuting director mocked all our expectations with an "unspeakable bucket of water." I am a fan of these outbursts of madness and genius and that is why I give it 10/10.
