Melancholie der Engel

What the heck was this movie about? I can never ever get back the 2.5 hours that I used of my life to watch this movie. There is very little sequential movement through this story and the randomness and extensive focus on the irrelevant produced a waking coma that I may never recover from. The symbolism is impossible to follow and even the nudity, to include random ball and sack shots, was out of place and added little to the comprehensibility of this film. This would be a perfect film for someone on death row who had nothing else to live for and was anxious to end their life in confusion.

This movie is as though a lesser talented director took a shot at breaking every taboo boundary that exists. Unfortunately, even with English subs the overall story lacks significantly (if it exists at all). Instead, you are left with a long movie collage of ramblings and animal torture, disturbing , and images of corpses littered around religious monuments with no true background or context. "Extreme" movie done poorly.

With its focus on audiovisual composition, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA essentially is an emotional experience. Not enough, the complexly developed story also stretches out to themes of friendship, passion, revenge and death wish. This assumes intense preoccupation with all the multiple layers of the movie. In aesthetic, tender images the stunned audience witnesses events that blurred the frontiers between reality and fiction probably already during the shooting. Just apparently in contradiction the events are accompanied by citations of German contemporary history, which gives Marian Dora's work a powerful intellectual historical basis. The movie's structure is similar to the baroque cathedral which gets a central role in the movie: The story and (only on the first sight) marginal details get mirrored like a symmetry axis and seem to be the counterpart of the leading characters destiny.

A personal work of director Marian Dora, the movie defies all formal conventions of storytelling. In nearly all scenes the movie breaks up to the audience's expectations. Established viewing and thinking habits as well as generally accepted and provided moral patterns are getting destroyed and stay unusable. If comparisons are appropriate at all, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA has its place between the work of Jodorowsky or Pasolini. However, the movie can't deny its German roots and openly admits its highly controversial underground cinema status: Poetic, radical, original, unwieldy and impossible to forget.

Melancholie der Engel is a truly terrible movie. Far from the worst I've ever seen, but nonetheless awful.

First off, the positives:

The movie has decent cinematography. It is clear Marian Dora has talent as a director and cinematographer, and that is especially displayed in his film "Cannibal", a far superior film. As visually unattractive and dull as the camera looks, Marian Dora's shots are for the most part good. Sometimes, the camera gets irritatingly close to the object in sight to the point where it's hard to tell what you're looking at, but for the most, it's smooth and generally pretty.

Though the soundtrack is generally one of the negatives of this movie, there was one long organ piece that is played twice in the movie that was legitimately gorgeous. Those are all the positive things I have to say about this movie.

Now, the negatives:

The worst and most offensive thing about this film is that is the most excruciatingly pretentious film I have ever seen. I have nothing against arthouse cinema, and I appreciate genuinely deep, philosophical and artistic media. This film fails at that however. The philosophical insights of this film are not only incredibly nihilistic, but not very interesting, deep, or thought-provoking. The film uses imagery, visual symbolism, and parallels to depict this ideas, but they are not only annoyingly obvious and unsubtle, they are just plain boring. Melancholie der Engel poses itself as an intelligent, gorgeous, masterful art piece among the likes of Bergman and Tarkovsky, when it has very little to offer except surface-level quasi-Nietzschean philosophical ideas.

The reason for the film's infamy however, is another negative thing about it. The film is known for being "disturbing" and full of sadistic, perverse, and foul imagery. This links back to my previous criticism of pretentiousness, as the film acts like these obvious shock value material is deep and meaningful. The film is full of grisly animal abuse, defecation, bodily fluids, torture, rape, and much, much more. The scenes are usually completely out of context and serve no relevance to previous or future material. It is clear Marian Dora wanted to make a shock movie, but he also wanted it to be presented as "art". So he would include a plethora of repulsive imagery, throw some dramatic music over it, and label it as "powerful" and "deep". I would rather any day a movie that embraces its foulness like A Serbian Film that doesn't try to hide under the facade of being art.

Some more minor complaints include: The editing was disjointed, annoying, and full of low-effort transitions. The soundtrack, with the exception of the one aforementioned organ piece, was generally very cheesy, melodramatic, sappy, and for the most part, extremely irritating. It certainly contributed to the pretentiousness of the film. One character, the old man, serves no purpose to the film besides killing animals and beating women. Additionally, the acting was mostly bad, with Katze being the main exception.

The film was overlong, overstuffed, and plain boring. You'd expect a film this full of nasty, gross imagery to be anything but a snoozefest, but it absolutely was. The film isn't disturbing, it's icky and revolting. And being stomach-churning doesn't stop it from being incredibly boring. The film is full of dull monologues that it becomes incredibly tedious and difficult to sit through. I found myself getting very drowsy and almost falling asleep during the first. The nasty imagery couldn't keep my interest, since it was also not very interesting or shocking either.

I will admit, I prefer this over August Underground or Slaughtered Vomit Dolls. There are some good things about this movie. But it was unbearably pretentious - it tried desperately to be "high-brow" and "artsy" but it failed horrendously. Just because the film isn't entirely bad doesn't mean it's worth your time. It was still a waste of time and a terrible experience. If you want a deep, philosophical arthouse movie that's actually good, watch "Stalker", "Andrei Rublev", or "The Seventh Seal". Want a disturbing and horrifying movie that isn't garbage? Watch Come and See, In a Glass Cage, Salo; Or the 120 Days of Sodom, or Cannibal Holocaust. There are so many better options than this stinker of a movie. God bless.

2/10.

Holy hell, I've just watched this since I finally got my hands on the English subtitles.

The movie has little to no plot, backstory or continuity whatsoever. The only thing that saves this movie is the excellent way in which the director manages to depict decay, death and several mental illnesses. Unfortunately, these themes however, exist within a vacuum and feel disjointed as hell. Trying to understand this film objectively is largely a futile exercise. The movie feeds on the reaction of the viewer, that's the only power it has, which makes it extremely fragile.

I would suggest to skip this movie, or if you're just curious about the sheer madness on display, watch a few selected scenes, there are plenty, I assure you.