User reviews

"Angel Express" is a silly little German film which thinks it's better than it is. Centered around the very chic underground culture of drug fiends, hookers, pimps and clubbers this is too cool for school. Directed with all the self-conscious stylings you'd expect from an inexperienced filmmaker this is pretty much just a mess. The narrative is strained through one of those everything and everyone is connected concepts and rather than elucidating this point, this idea merely serves to expose the film's shortcomings. Little less cool and a lot more character and scene development and this may have been passable.

ANGEL EXPRESS is the first feature film by RP Kahl, produced by himself with his company erdbeermundfilm – a guarantor for ambitious and enjoyable independent cinema. This debut takes a laconic and nonchalant perspective on the ambivalent lives of Berlin clubbers in the nineties – torn between (creative) self-fulfilment and (emotional) emptiness, between the hope for love and the fast kick. The film alludes to American cult novel "American Psycho" as well as to European auteur cinema à la Godard. This is exactly the reason why ANGEL EXPRESS is both, a dark society portrait and a humorous self-reflection.

The five protagonists somnambulate through Berlin's nightlife. Their personal stories are episodically interwoven, there is no linearity, it's only the music's beat which determines their rhythm. And in spite of all the people's loneliness there emerges a humour, which smiles ironically at these lives, but never gives them away. Because all these people are hungry for life. This is why ANGEL EXPRESS at first glance appears quite cool and aloof but in the end is a loving homage to the pulsating Berlin-Mitte life in the 1990s.