What you don’t see

What you don’t see – This 2009 film is what critics call “an atmospheric thriller.” Directed by Wolfgang Fischer, What you don’t see is a German picture, shot along a wild and deserted Brittany coastland. The picture commences in full Deutsch romantic style with a Rueckenfigure (someone seen from behind) gazing out over the expanse of the sea – the image could have been extracted from one of Casper David Friedrich’s paintings. The solitary sea-gazer is Anton is troubled adolescent. He has been brought to this barren, empty seashore by his mother and her lover. His father, we learn, committed suicide. The lonely youth meets an enigmatic couple – a boy and girl just a little older than him. The girl seems poised to seduce Anton. The boy is a juvenile delinquent, a kid who commits mayhem while maintaining a masklike expression, broad and melancholy like a clown with his features painted as a tragic mask. In many ways, the film seems a commentary on the famous sequence in Nick Ray’s Rebel without a Cause in which James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo set up housekeeping in an abandoned mansion in the Hollywood Hills. The kids form their own family in defiance of the unhappy families from which they come. What you don’t see suggests something similar: Anton is adopted by the sinister couple and they roam the beautiful, if desolate, countryside, returning to their home base, a ruinous summer cottage near the beach. Anton and his parents are staying nearby in a rental house that seems to be an exact duplicate of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth house, the glass cubicle in Illinois, set on the banks of the Fox River. The open design of that house and its walls of glass make the place strangely eerie at night and it’s a good locale for events that become increasingly enigmatic and ghostly. The film is quite predictable: it’s the kind of picture where people lay face-down in water or vanish in the depths of pond, but, then, resurface after simulating death. It’s also the kind of picture in which we know that the cheerful Labrador receiver that we see trotting in the surf will be a victim of someone’s sadism before the film is complete. The acting is good and the locations are spectacular – the Brittany coast is scattered with crumbling bunkers from World War II, weird rock formations, and a solitary dolmen in the depths of an enchanted forest around which a golden haze of gnats buzz. Some of the watery marsh scenes, including a lagoon in which a dead fawn lies under the crystalline water, remind me of Tarkovsky – probably an influence since Fischer’s film production company uses the name “Stalker” in its title. This picture is very adagio, but effective. The ending is a puzzle that the viewer predicts, but, nonetheless, doesn’t quite understand.