Antibodies

Antibodies – Antibodies is an effective and frightening serial killer film with atrocities alternating between Berlin and a tiny, rural village, Herzbach. Not surprisingly, the film’s director Christian Alvart stages his horrors elegantly and with intelligence – after all, our modern fascination with serial killers originates with German expressionism, Fritz Lang virtually invented the genre with his iconic M, and the Austrian, Robert Musil, applied a patina of abstract respectablility to the theme in his vast Proustian novel The Man without Qualilties.(featuring the Sex-Moerder, Moosbrugger). Alvart provides his plot with clever dialogue, including theological debate on the meaning of evil, and the film’s climax is impressive, emotionally gripping, and precise to its Biblical precedent, the grim fable of Abraham and Isaac. The picture is compelling while underway and, certainly, fastens itself upon the viewer’s imagination, but, of course, a few moments of rational contemplation will suffice to convince the viewer that the plot is nonsensical and, in fact, on close inspection, doesn’t make much sense. In broad outline, the movie concerns a predatory and murderous pedophile (he crucifies his victims after sexually molesting them and paints garish canvases in their blood) captured by the dimwitted authorities and, like Dr. Hannibal Lecter, taunting them from his cell. A yokel cop obsessed by the murder of a 12-year girl in his village, Herzbach, comes to Berlin to interview, and be tempted by, the villain. The cop is a righteous man, a practicing Catholic, and sexually repressed. This element of the plot, the naïf astray in the fleshpots of the big city, bears a striking resemblance to the situation in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute. Like John Klute, our small-town cop is patronized by the big-city police, generally, disregarded, and, of course, seduced by a beautiful, if depraved, urban sophisticate. And like Klute, our bucolic Barney Fife solves the crime and shows himself morally superior to his big-city peers. Visually, the film is exceedingly accomplished – in fact, its geometric rigor and icy beauty remind me of Pakula’s style, although, I think, the film is more closely related to recent pictures of the same sort: thrillers of the Korean new wave such as Mother (Bong Joon Ho) and the truly horrific Argentinan psycho-killer series Epitafios, made in 2003 - 2004, the year before Antibodies was released. Like those pictures, Antibodies features crisp, hard-edged, asymmetrical compositions, startling vertical shots, and unanticipated transitions from extreme long to close shots. The color in each shot is generally monochromatic, tending toward glacial blues and acid greens and Alvart uses discordant editing to create suspense effects by energizing off-screen space: what you can’t see is worse than what is shown. The milieu is effectively realized; in particular, the tiny town of Herzbach is visualized as one of those distant Burgs glimpsed in the background of Albrecht Duerer engravings, an infestation of tile roofs and shabby brown walls crammed like moss into the seams of a remote mountain. The film’s contempt for Catholicism and the denizens of the small town is matched only by its revulsion at the sexual excess of the residents of Berlin. Sexual freedom is shown as perversion, although pruriently and with a great amount of salacious detail. At times, the film seems about to venture into camp. A proposal that the DNA of all of the villagers be tested seems to promise a masturbatory wank-fest. Alvart retreats from that precipice, preferring to show more decorous DNA-swab testing – just a dab from the inner cheek, a failure of nerve that wrecks one of his subplots concerning a farmer who refuses to cooperate. (Clearly, the film’s original design was to have the Bauer refuse to give a sample because of shame at his impotence, something that would be revealed in the onanism necessary to secure the sample; with the DNA testing done by cheek-swab, this plot point is spoiled). The film is well-acted but, probably too dire and disturbing for many viewers. A moment’s reflection will convince the viewer that the film’s ostensibly happy ending is a sham – after all, someone set the fire in the hero’s house.