Fesseln

This is an interesting film about love and jealousy, and how an apparently quiet and normal man can disguise his mounting paranoia from everyone but the object of his suffocating affection, his wife. Because Jurgen Prochnow plays the unbalanced Guenther so well, there were times early on when my sympathy was with him. Even as the story progresses and his terrified wife, Hanna, is physically trapped in her home and all my sympathy was with her, it was still dreadful to watch the anguish on Guenther's face. This is an intelligent man, who deep down knows that everything he's doing is wrong, but can't help himself. Katharina Bohm matches Prochnow in the acting stakes, and there are moments when this seems like a good two-handed play. The final ten minutes are superb.

It takes a while before this thriller really is on its way with an expose that seems to go on and on, and there are certainly weak points in the script, as for instance the too naive and not well-thought out role of the mother (Cornelia Froboess), the rather muddled business aspect of the relation between mother and son-in-law and the certainly the naiveté of the woman not to see the real character of her husband at all; the woman keeps following her husband and abiding his every wish, which - as she does not love him anymore - is hard to accept.

But still, when all these introductions are dealt with and the film confines itself to limited space, it becomes a tense and exciting Kammerspiel that will have you on the edge of your seat. Both Jürgen Prochnow and Katharina Böhm are excellent and the film is very well-directed and photographed by Xaver Schwarzenberger, with good editing. As a whole, however, the film is unbalanced.