Unjustly cast alongside John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the only similarities that Jörg Buttgereit’s Schramm shares with its genre counterpart is that both pictures are, as NcNaughton’s subtitle succinctly states, intimate portraits of mass murderers. However, whereas the American director’s tale is iconoclastically revealing, the German filmmaker’s exposé is inversely proportional by contrast, for it poses as an epic novel while, in all actuality, serves as a vignette at best.
Lothar Schramm (Florian Koerner von Gustorf) is a serial killer. This is all that Buttgereit provides his audience for there is not plot, little conflict, a resounding deficit of character development or exposition, and nothing of interest outside the question of “why”–not in respect to the titular character–but to the picture as a whole.
Schramm begins promisingly as its slow motion montages, interlaced with a patient violin-led score by Max Müller and Gundula Schmitz, suggests that what is about to be presented will be comparable to McNaughton’s feature or Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. However, shortly after the credits, Buttgereit makes his audience start to ask questions and, for no other plausible reason than to be vague in hopes of veiling the fact that he has no premise, never offers answers.
Giving the film benefit of the doubt, if Buttgereit had perhaps allotted himself a little more than an hour to tell his tale, his piecemeal motifs might have finally aligned themselves into something of an inadvertent cohesion. Instead, we are left with only the slightest of hints as to what he might be proposing: The theory that the crux of a killer’s mania lies in the fact that the person is innately ill at ease with existence itself. Such subsequently manifests itself in an overbearing sense of anxiety, which, in Schramm’s case, is goaded by perpetual pessimism, thereby creating a scenario where the character cannot bear to wait for the proverbial piano to fall on his head. Instead, he must force the hand of doom at every opportunity in order to release the agonizing pressure of possibility.
Yet, such a reading of the film is granting a lot to the proceedings for most everything placed within the narrative seems to be without apparent purpose as it nonetheless hopes to posit coherent meaning. For example, is the note that Schramm was once engaged to be considered, at least in part, the impetus for his homicidal rage? Buttgereit seems to want to say no, that the hollowness of his central character is beyond that of the normative world around him (even in the presence of unrequited love for a prostitute) yet, with much the same dismissive frivolity, he inserts the theme of what may or may not be a prosthetic leg which may or may not have ended Schramm’s running career. Moreover, is our witnessing of Schramm painting his walls in an effort to veil the petulantly seeping bloodstains intended to represent the existential futility of life, even in its passing, or an indicator of the unstable logic which haphazardly drives Schramm as he nevertheless continues to roll layer upon layer of latex enamel despite the fact that he did not first wash the blood from the surface or let is dry completely? Need we even humor the objective behind the painting which dominates Schramm’s apartment which all but declares to be the omnipresent glare of his tyrannical mother?
This does not mean to imply that Buttgereit’s film is without its requisite points of interest. Unlike many serial killer narratives, there is no confrontation between good and evil, the former all-too-frequently represented in the guise of police/detective justice. Furthermore, Schramm is not the reclusive genius: he has a 9-to-5 job as a taxi driver and seems to be of average intelligence. Also, and perhaps the German director’s highlight, is that Schramm has friends, yet they have nary a clue of the killings which Schramm is responsible, which runs counter to the commonplace cinematic stereotype where, if a killer is amiable, the person’s friends are either accomplices or complacent and protective of their comrade’s evil deeds. In this regard, we can at least credit the director for trying but, once again, his accomplishments are for polishing of the ship’s brass in lieu of the fact that he never bothered to repair the dilapidated engine.
Though excessively gratuitous to the point of reprehension, Michael Romahn’s special effects are so exactingly, convincingly executed that one is forced to pause and consider the notion that perhaps what we are witnessing is real. This becomes all the more daunting at the disclosure that such includes Schramm driving three nails into his penis, a derelict is seen committing suicide by way of a pistol to the temple, and–upon its premier–a Vagina Dentata from Hell.
The international subtitle of Schramm is “Into the Mind of a Serial Killer.” Granted, if Jörg Buttgereit wanted to propose the hypothesis that such is ultimately incoherent and without focus, he nevertheless fails to provide a motive, subconscious or otherwise, for his character’s bloodlust (existential futility cannot be self-containing anymore than the linguistic constraint upon the concept of nihilism). As a consequence, the director’s character sketch remains sketchy at best for there is little to be had outside of unjustified misogyny, arbitrary gore, and a convoluted storyline which all but admits that no agenda was set prior to filming.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
