Sunday, June 27, 2021

Gerald Kargl's ANGST (aka Fear) (1983)

 A  eat dog world, right?



Angst sets out to do something that is remarkable simply because the director makes it work: use the grammar of Cinema to get into a psychotic killer's headspace. More to the point, how Gerald Kargl and the cinematographer Rybczynski and this crew shoot much of the film, from this overhead I assume on a dolly track perspective, has in my limited perception (I'm sure scholars and critics can be more perceptive than me on this I mean) the tact of a God's eye point of view. 

If this was shot at all in any kind of standard Shot-Reverse-Shot manner it wouldn't stick or could become stale fast. But actually this is not true either; the script, which is thoroughly, vividly and rigorously from the point of view of this character, doesn't give us anything like conventional scenes for the most part - matter of fact I can't recall if he has a single conversation in the entire runtime with another person - so it's all just pure running and stalking and killing in sometimes sloppy/stupid/efficient physicality, and voiceover.


So we gave these staggering shots looking over what's going on, mostly with him there and sometimes with things like the family coming to the house that he's broken into, and there's also very stark and wild POV shots that at times seem to be with the camera strapped to the actor (I'm reminded of that one shot of a drunk Keitel in Mean Streets, or like 20% of Requiem for a Dream), and this is also when he is doing what he thinks he has to do to enact his elaborate and destined to fail plan involving whatever it is to make this family suffer. Angst in other words is as much of an experiment in terror as it is a story of a killer. So many times we've seen stories about mass murdering fuckwads. There are only so many times the filmmakers bother to try and grapple and reckon with what it means to SHOW it in a visceral style.

In other words, Angst is one of those movies, the notorious ones like Man Bites Dog or Cannibal Holocaust, where it isn't about trying to play headgames through subtlety or a director thinking they're too clever for the audience. On the contrary, I'm not so surprised this was even banned by some countries - though it shouldn't have been to be clear - as it is so In Your Face that it goes up to the edge or even just is exploitation, in this case of an actual murder that happened (and according to what one can find online about it, the movie actually softens what happened, as in hours more torture of the young woman by the demented bastard).

It builds up this anxious head of steam with how the director is showing us this man, played with this nervous and uncontainable energy by Erwin Leder (reminding one of a German Caleb Landry Jones) roaming around post prison release, abhorrently devouring a sausage (oh the power of the closeup, if only you could've known Mr Griffith), failing to release his homicidal urges on a cab driver, and then coming upon this house that he breaks into and then chaos ensues. 

On paper the story seems so pat, but the director does such a harrowing job of doing on a cinematic level what Stephen King often wrote about (or at least he did that one time in that introduction to the Dark Tower or one of those books), which is to fill the spaces with detail: this is staggering not because of the list of events but because of how we see the sweat pour out, how that dog barks, how the mother does *that* onto the wall, the image of the crippled man going up the steps, and finally that one murder that feels truthful even if it wasn't quite the truth of the real case: this is brutal and awful and... this is how it happens.

If it has a drawback, at least on a first viewing at home, it's that the last section right before the ending (which is great and brings things in a staggering way full circle almost like out of a nightmare ala Clockwork Orange) drags a little as the killer is doing in step by step detail what he thinks he needs to to get all the bodies together and clean up. It's not that the film stops dead or lacks any of the prior energy, very far from it, just that by now the film has led up to and done its one thing eith exceptional precision, and now we still have more to go. Again, this could be a first time watch sort of thing, and it is still riveting to experience, merely the minor drop before the last hurrah, so to speak.


This really does merit it's BEWARE stickers and parental advisory notices. I feel a little bad for Kargl in the short film in that it didn't get the recognition at the time and only gained cult status many years later (albeit my wife informed me after some research he's had a swimming career in commercials and Educational films - ironically near the end of this he makes an unintentional PSA for distracted driving). But he achieved his goal: tell the truth through a particular GIANT even bigger than life cinematic intensity through how the we see, from above or very close and in tumultuous compositions, what happens and gets taken for granted in the litany of True Crime stories and documentaries. To see it this way makes it... horrible.