Fear

Angst; thriller, Austria, 1983; D: Gerald Kargl, S: Erwin Leder, Silvia Ryder, Edith Rosset, Rudolf Götz

A nameless man is released from prison after serving a sentence for stabbing his mother, who survived, and killing a 70-year old woman. He enters a taxi and wants to strangle the driver with a shoelace, but when the woman turns around he escapes in the forest. The man breaks into a house and kills an older woman, her grown daughter and grown son, a handicapped man in a wheelchair. The killer hides the corpses in their car and drives off to a snack bar, but since he had a hit-and-run car accident, the police track him down and catch him.

Independent slasher-thriller "Fear" is a strange and peculiar viewing experince. It is intense and dynamic, thanks to an elaborate visual style since the cinematographer Zbigniew Rybczynski uses unusual camera angles (either a bird perspective or a frog perspective, representing the POV of a predator and prey; a camera attached with a ring to the body of the main actor, thereby creating a feeling of claustrophobia as he runs through the forest while the camera is fixated on his head) to conjure up a distorted, disorienting feel congruent to the mental state of the nameless sadistic psychopath, but the director Gerald Kargl doesn't have much else going for it, since the story is basically empty and overstretched. The main nameless antagonist barely speaks three sentences in the entire film, as only his off-narration is heard in the background, giving some sparse glimpses into his diagnosis: for instance, he narrates how he simply has to kill and torture someone, that this urge simply takes him over, which makes "Fear" all the more disturbing—it is a portrait of mindless evil without motive. Basically a sketchy analysis of a terrorist and a criminal. Two sequences are unbearable to watch (the killer stabbing the woman running away in the hallway, while her small dog is helpess to stop him; the killer drowning the handicapped man in the bathtub), and the rest is just running on empty, leaving the impression that "Fear" was not up for such a complex task, since it relies more on shock, instead of intelligence, sophistication and creativity.

Grade:++