Sarah joue un loup garou

Before the pandemic closed doors and gates for us, "Sarah Plays a Werewolf" (2017) was about to be screened as part of a performing arts festival. I do not know if it was to be its first showing in Panama, or a revival. The truth is that I had not heard anyone say a word about this Swiss film, and for that matter, almost all the cinema not produced in North America. Not because people were uninterested or rejected the product, but because, like me, until last night, they did not know about it. A friend passed it to me, and he just said "Watch this, it is good."

I think "good" is not the most apt word to appreciate it... "necessary" is more appropriate, because, as much as we may repel the topics it addresses, however indifferent a Swiss girl in crisis is to us, this film and its portraits can be found in our societies with other names, cultures, skin colors, social or educational levels: difficult adolescence, forced maturation, kids too sensitive, emotional fibers too fragile not to break, rapture for suicide, fondness for lies, sexual harassment in family... all uncomfortable and disturbing, like a basket full of flying cockroaches, that we dare not uncover.

Sarah is 17 years old and taking a theater course, in which it is evident that her information, education and ability are above what the rest of the class know, including her teacher. The course goes from reading classics to collective creation, while in her personal life, Sarah seeks affection but only finds rejection from her peers, on the one hand, or incestuous signs, from her father's groping possessiveness. Sarah's fascination with suicide grows: her imaginary boyfriend Luke, her brother Sebastian, and Juliet (that is, Romeo's girl) all were seeking truth by killing themselves. Sarah is a bomb about to detonate, wandering the streets of Geneva. It is no wonder that, despite its 86 minutes, the dense symptomatology of her nameless ailment makes the movie seem longer.

In summary, it welcomes a new unknown filmmaker, Katharina Wyss, who contributes one more case to illustrate the decline of the northern West and its main victims, the young. It is not that we are better in the South, but maybe our decline is more evident and rawer, so the "discreet charm" can hardly hide the symptoms.

Like Josephine Decker's recent "Madeline's Madeline", Katharina Wyss's debut "Sarah Plays a Werewolf" is also about a teenage girl who really only discovers herself when being someone else and although set around a theatre class, Wyss' film isn't so much about the process of acting as it is about getting inside the skulls of its characters and in particular inside the troubled mind of Sarah, (a terrific Loane Balthasar). The title might suggest a piece of schlock-horror but you can tell quite early on that this is going to be a much darker, psychological piece, it's violence very subtly applied as it slips only occasionally into fantasy.

Where Decker's film smacked of 'The Method' this Swiss movie feels much more radically 'realist' while the brilliance and depth of Balthasar's performance is alarmingly not like 'acting' at all. This is a rigorous, very European film and it gives us a very different picture of teenage angst than we are used to seeing in American or even British cinema. In the end, it is a horror film and one that will certainly evoke "Carrie" but without the bloodletting and flying daggers. The horrors Sarah experiences are the horrors of being a lonely, if very talented, child with too much imagination and too much time to sit and brood in her insular, almost incestuous, family and unlike DePalma's "Carrie" this Sarah really will chill you to the bone.