User reviews

Just saw the US premiere of the film at the Seattle International Film Festival. I have seen the American version of this story, but this is a far different film with a different goal.

While the US version concentrated on the more sensational parts of the story and the aftermath, this movie is much more interested in the drama of the situation and avoids the 'creeky door' effect of the US version. The filmmaker is very dispassionate about attempting to convince you one way or the other if it was a possession or a woman's psychological breakdown and I find that most appealing. (The US version also tried to ride the fence in a sense, but it was more obvious which "side" it picked as there were many horror movie moments, not present in this version.) The acting was universally GREAT and all actors were so very convincing in their roles. It will be interesting to see how American audiences that venture out to see this version accept it (It will NOT be the hit that "Emily Rose" was here as this will be considered an art film in America and I doubt will be widely released.) Look for it in the US and check it out!

In the 70's, in the countryside of Germany, the epileptic Michaela Klingler (Sandra Hüller) joins the pedagogy course in the university against the will of her pious mother Marianne {Imogen Kogge). However her father Karl Klingler (Burghart Klaußner) rents a room in a sorority house and the religious Michaela travels to Tübingen. Along the semester, Michaela befriends her former high school mate Hanna Imhof (Anna Blomeier) that forces her to seek medical assistance and falls in love for the student of chemistry Stefan Weiser (Nicholas Reinke). When Michaela has a crisis, she stops using the necessary drugs and believes she is possessed by demons, and her health gets worse. She decides to seek out the priest Martin Borchert (Jens Harzer) that believes in exorcism instead of the progressive parochial priest Gerhard Landauer (Walter Schmidinger) that tries to convince her to go to a psychologist. When she has an intense breakdown, her mother together with priest Borchert decide to exorcise her with tragic consequences.

"Requiem" is an impressive dramatic movie about the fight between religion and science. In accordance with the introduction of this film, the story would be based on a true event. The acting is wonderful, giving credibility to the plot, and the dialogs and characters present a great discussion between the dogmatic religion and reason. Michaela is very well developed and it is easy to understand her confused state of mind since she had a repressed and overprotected upbringing. Hannah represents the logic and the reason; Marianne and priest Borchert represent the backward and dogmatic side of the church; Karl and priest Landauer represent the in-between these two sides. "Requiem" is not a pleasant or entertaining feature but highly recommended for fans of a powerful drama with magnificent acting and the excellent German cinema. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Requiem"

A sad tale of a young girl's aspirations disastrously ruined by her and her family's inability to separate her religion from her mental illness.

The script is commendably non-judgemental, despite the subject matter, and the the movie's early seventies setting is re-created so convincingly (with muted colours and almost dogme-like camera work) that one might forget that the film was shot only three years ago.

Some may find that the film ends before the story does, but this is merely a refreshing refusal to pander to sensationalism that is completely in keeping with the naturalistic realism of the film as a whole.

To be frank I completely disagree with the above critique. I found this film quite moving and very sad - I still can't stop thinking about.

I thought the way it was shot moved it along fairly nicely and was thankfully fairly anti- Hollywood which was a nice relief. Of course most Americans will probably not enjoy it because it's too subtle, nothing explodes and they actually have to think for a change rather than being told how to feel. If Hollywood had done this film it would have been all moody lighting, scary music and SFX - it would have been just another badly done version of The Exorcist (which I think is also a great film).

I think what I found the most interesting was that because this film was done in such an understated manner, you could actually understand what Michaella was going through in a much more realistic, believable manner.

There is a beautiful scene where near the end of the film Michaella's boyfriend takes her to her parents house because she is in such a bad state. She is soon surrounded by her parents and two priest all praying and chanting at her trying to exorcise her demons - her boyfriend steps away as he really doesn't know where to put himself or what to do as he watches the chanting - he looks like he is witnessing the dark ages of superstition; all completely anachronistic to the time he lives in.

Documentary style was a great choice - there were no true good or bad guys. And Michaella truly believed that she was possessed. So in a really strange way it was more an analysis of faith and belief. At the end of the day she, her family and the creepy priest all absolutely believed that she was possessed therefore she was.

Was that a good or bad thing, considering that nowadays most people barely believe anything at all?

Maybe she did fight an epic battle against demons for our souls like Saint Margarita - can anyone prove otherwise?

I've seen both The Exorcism of Emily Rose and this one and found Requiem to be far better and realistic than the other. Emily Rose, in my opinion, was supposed to be commercial Hollywood film. It lulled me to sleep whereas Requiem kept me interested during its entirety. The chief reason for this being the phenomenal performance by the lead actress.

The direction of the film is great as well, since it clearly allows the viewers to form their own decision whether the girl is possessed or schizophrenic. Viewers make their decisions based on which side of the faith they lie. It runs a bit slow but is an excellent psycho-drama devoid of any gratuitous scary scenes.

So overall, in case you like scary stuff, watch Emily Rose; which is not such a great scary movie either. However, if you like psychological dramas and do not wish to watch movies that make you jump out of your seat, watch this one.

Phew this is hard to put into words.

At first I thought the cinematography was stunning, beautifully shot and the period was captured perfectly - I felt like I was watching a film shot in 1972 and it brought back early memories of the 70s.

The script was wonderfully subtle, there was absolutely no judgements about the characters. It would have been very easy to show the mother as a cruel an twisted woman but instead you could empathise with her, she thought she was doing the best for her daughter and that made the whole thing more tragic but also more real and beautiful.

To me the central message of the film was that life, however short is something to celebrate. The girl makes references to St Katarina who only lived a short time but did many wonderful things. She may not have escaped her strict and cruel mother for long but at least she did it and had a wonderful time for a while.

I kept having to tell myself they were actors. The depiction of the girl's first kiss at college was unlike any other I've seen. They captured the clumsiness and true feeling of the situation perfectly.

And finally the soundtrack - you'd think that deep purple wrote 'Anthem' for this film. Earlier we see her dancing ecstatically to the track when she's finally free at college and then we later see the relevance when it's used to play out at the end of the film.

I'm not sure I'll ever see a better film that this and I recommend it to anyone who occasionally likes to be moved by a movie.

Top notch performance by Sandra Huller, who thoroughly deserved the Silver Bear for the best actress in this film at the Berlin Film Festival. A very good film on epilepsy and mental illness, not possession by the evil spirits. Ms Huller has been consistently performing well in the films,such as "In the Aisles" and "Toni Erdmann."

Requiem works for many reasons--an intelligent script, understated direction, a somewhat verite camera style--but most of all it works because of Sandra Huller. For all of Michaela's exceptionalism, at no point could I doubt this character. As a recovering Catholic myself, I'm sensitive to the role religion, especially Catholicism, plays in people's lives; and Huller, in my opinion, creates the real thing: implicit faith that needs neither to advertise nor to apologize. Michaela's faith isn't about doctrine or rules but the meaning of life--more specifically, about living the meaning of one's own life, including its less attractive implications. Her faith makes her vulnerable to the devil (or, if you prefer, to her imagination that the devil is messing with her), but her faith also endows her growing suffering (and her eventual death, which she clearly foresees; note her reference to "martyrdom" in one of the last scenes) with an abundance of the same meaning that has sustained her life. She is peaceful at the end ("I must walk my path to the end.") That may be hard for a non-religious person to understand, but to someone raised on stories of the great saints, as Michaela was, it makes perfect sense. It is even something to be grateful for.

Requiem pulls off a bit of cinematic legerdemain in making Michaela a relatively open, non-fanatical, non-prudish woman in spite of the depth of her faith. Her real-life original, Anneliese Michel, wasn't much like that. She was a very conservative Catholic deeply opposed to the liberalization then occurring in the Catholic church after the Vatican Council. Her death and the subsequent trial of her parents and the exorcists forced a kind of confrontation, at least in Germany, between Catholic traditionalism, which has an entirely literal belief in spiritual realities and regards demonic possession and exorcism as established facts, and ecclesiastical modernism, which is embarrassed by such medieval notions and therefore preferred to take the position that Michel was "merely" mentally disturbed. (And if she were, did she suffer any the less? Was her faith any less meaningful to her?) Traditionalists regard Michel, her parents, and the exorcists as martyrs to a modernist church disloyal to its Christian past, and Michel's grave is today a pilgrimage site primarily for conservative Catholics. You'd never guess any of this from Requiem's very sympathetic treatment of her story.

Requiem (2006)

When a positive, well-meaning, troubled young woman meets an ungodly end at the hands of religious zealots, it matters that it is based on fact. So when you see what is going on here to this girl, leaving for college and struggling with some kind of mental disorder, you not only feel for the character. You are astonished about a culture that still has room for this.

The portrayal of mental illness has transformed enormously in the history of movies partly because psychology has changed, too, from Freud and Jung to now. Even looking at the last few minutes of "Psycho" (which everyone conveniently forgets), you see that arch confidence and inaccuracy of mid-century psychology. And now, in 2011, we know how to treat epilepsy (the purported disorder of the main character) and even schizophrenia (likely an additional problem judging by the symptoms) with some level of control.

But this movie is set between the two, around 1971, and so with hindsight we are shocked and frustrated by the people around our main character showing either a "get over it" attitude of a more deadly "god will intervene" kind of attitude. Neither was a good thing.

And yet this woman, played with unusual conviction and brilliant by Sandra Huller, is all about trying to survive. Because of her upbringing she interprets some events as God rejecting her (she can't reach her rosary beads during one epileptic fit), and of course this leads to priests, and to the priests thinking they know how to possibly cure the poor girl. Eventually real life exorcisms are performed, and in a weird synchronicity, a real-world version of the 1973 American film, "The Exorcist."

This one is German, and instead of making everything strange, it makes everything universal. We sometimes think of religious extremism as an American trait, but in fact it is everywhere. This version gives it a Roman Catholic overtone and yet grounds in the the real world, where priests are rather ordinary folk. not mythic brooding types (though the younger priest here is, vaguely, a German Damien). The original "The Exorcist" it turns out was based on a German Lutheran (not Catholic) boy, yet another small echo of one movie to the other.

The comparisons can go too far, for sure. This is a modern movie in what is one thread of contemporary European filmmaking--understated, realist, tautly filmed, issue based movies, many of them from Denmark or Germany. It's a great complement to what is being made here (in the U.S.), with a different flair for dialog and sometimes a more elaborate production sense. This is not small budget but it is straight ahead and almost bare bones in its approach, thoughtfully made and edited. And pertinent now in the sense that fanaticism in any form is to be questioned before it's too late.

The great thing about this film is that it has its total and very own style. It stays perfectly loyal to the time in what it is set. Even camera movement is adjusted to it: sudden zooms, hand-held camera work and nearly no music added. Acting performances are interesting and mostly convincing. Although this will help you through the film in an interesting way, it is not enough to make it a good film...

I have been looking for the conflict in this film and I have been looking for the central message of the director. They are there alright, but I have not experienced a single moment of being sucked into or swept out of the movie. I think it would be far more shocking to read actual facts about the girl to whom this happened for real, than to watch this fictive movie that misses its clue.

This movie doesn't have a clear message. Instead the title "requiem" really shows what this is about: looking at a person's life in every aspect of it. So the storytelling has to be much more from a distant viewpoint. Some may call this documentary-style as it seems to show a real social case study. Personally it reminded me a little bit of the early Scorseses style of movie-making (e.g. taxi driver): neutral viewpoint, but still subtle messages within, and finally the big clash in the ending, when all strings of the story developed throughout the movie come together.

For me, this is the best way of doing such a movie. First everything feels so normal as you watch the movie. In the end extreme situations begin to develop. Because you know the context, even it is a really extreme situation, it seems to be not at all inexplicable but very real, which it actually was. I could personally feel the helplessness with this situation, because I could not blame anybody in the movie, there was not a side who did anything wrong on purpose. All are just human beings, who are presented perfectly and believable through very good acting. The final shot of the girl's face with background organ music expresses many feelings I have about the movie.

All in all it is a very good movie, but of course it still does not feel as great as some of the best movies of the time. 9 stars

In 2006's "Requiem" we are introduced to a young girl who claims to be possessed during her first year at university. The movie is based on the true story of Anneliese Michel who died during an exorcism in 1976 in Germany. This movie is a character study where you follow Sandra Hüller portraying the young girl and her daily struggles and breakdowns.

The movie is really slow and is heavy on the drama which I did not expect. The story of Annelise Michel inspired another movie called "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" (2005) which was also full of drama but mixed with some horror aspects. In this movie you don't have horror at all even though it's tagged as horror. The movie really manages to look like it plays in the 70s and the acting is great. Especially Sandra Hüller who is an astonishing actress does an amazing performance, therefore making it easy to empathize with her. However I honestly was bored throughout most of the film, which doesn't mean that it's bad. It's more that it's my personal preference and that I needed the pacing to be slightly faster for the movie to have some memorable scenes. Overall I liked the approach from The Exorcism of Emily Rose much more and was overall disappointed by "Requiem". [4,0/10]

Requiem is based on the real life incident of Anneliese Michel which also served as the basis for the Hollywood film 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose'. But while that was a standard Hollywood-ised commercial horror film, Requiem is a much more realistic, understated and sedate film that tries to examine the events leading up to the girl's supposed possession.

First of all, it will be very wrong to approach 'Requiem' as a horror film at least in the conventional sense. Directed by Hans- Christian Schmid, this is a film about faith and liberation. It's very Bergman-esque in the way it deals with the effect of religion on the society as a whole as well as individuals. Michaela and her family are devout Roman Catholics and they truly believe in their religion. They are good, mild mannered people who live decent lives. We are informed right at the beginning that Michaela has an epileptic condition which had forced her to drop a whole year of school. But then she gets accepted in University and becomes adamant to go even by going against her mother's strong apprehensions. What follows is a heartbreaking story of a sweet, adorable and smart, young girl completely falling apart.

The film beautifully tackles the concept of self-guilt. The mindsets of people around you and lack of liberty can have a very chaotic impact on an unstable and impressionable mind. Michaela was a devout Christian, but she also wanted to be a liberated young girl and study and see the world without being subjected to repression. But certain incidents and her family members' attitude towards her(although they only wanted her to stay safe) made her feel more and more guilty about herself and her actions. Once you reach a breaking point and start believing that what you're doing is morally wrong and God will not accept you for it, it can have a very negative impact especially in the case of Michaela who already was medically ill. Although the director clearly makes a case against the supposed possession of the girl, but never does he make the Church and the priests out to be villains. As a matter of fact everyone in the film other than Michaela loves her and only wants her to be happy, safe and healthy.

The central performance by Sandra Hüller is brilliant. She portrays a wide variety of emotions ranging from happiness, sweetness, love, anger and ending with utter madness. The scenes towards the end of the film are absolutely heartbreaking. The director has to be appreciated for dealing with this subject with such humanism without resorting to shoddy and mechanical alternatives. When the film ends, you can't help but feel a sense of melancholy and sorrow especially knowing what the consequences were in real life after the narrative in the film ends. Beautiful film.

A girl, from a conservative rural town in 1970s Germany, suffers from epilepsy and mental illness, but believe that she is possessed by devils; in the actual events on which 'Requiem' is based, she died after repeated exorcisms. If 'The Exorcist' comes immediately to mind (and there is one, short, truly distressing scene in this movie in which exorcism is indeed performed), the better comparison is perhaps with 'Breaking the Waves', although this movie is less strange and sexual than Lars von Trier's film. But it's also very good: it's superbly acted and never overplayed, while the world of recent past is depicted unspectacularly, but utterly convincingly, instead of the cheap references to popular culture that dominate most movies set in the 1970s, we see here a world like our own, only a little drained of colour. Perhaps the best tribute I can pay is to say that for a film with such an esoteric subject matter, it surprisingly, and chillingly, tells what feels like a universal story.

This film suffers from it's documentary approach...

I didn't experience what Michaela Klinger (in real life Anneliese Michel) experienced, at all! Instead, the filmmakers betray her point of view by showing how totally ridiculous church people behave.

So, since the antagonist is a jerk anyway, there's no real conflict! And no suspense, unfortunately.

I just couldn't believe the arrogance of this film. Even a mainstream movie like "Emily Rose" managed to get deep into the characters and create interesting human conflicts.

After listening to interviews with the director, it seems he even wanted it this way - anti-audience!

Is Hans-Christian Schmid proud not to entertain?