The Angels’ Melancholia (2009)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Awesome cinematography. Interesting characters. Fantastic soundtrack. A piece of art. PS: The cat was not killed. It's SFX.

I picked up a copy of this film back in 2010 but was highly disappointed when I found there were no subtitles, so for a long time I had no idea what was going on. Sufficed to say, I finally found the subtitles so I can properly give this title a review.Many people may regard this as a horror film, due to the horrific content, but to me this is about as far from horror as you can get. There's no build up of tension, no jarring moments (other than the extreme gore, excrement and decay) and no backstory. This is as art house as art house gets, and if you've seen any of Marian Dora's other films, you know what you're getting. At first glance, this film is rather tedious and underwhelming. But after really watching it, I found the cinematography to be rather awesome. To me this film portrays decay and death rather well. You can almost smell the rotting flesh, human excrement and other foul stenches you would find in an open air mass grave. Marian Dora certainly knows how to portray putrefaction and disgust. This sort of film will have it's supporters and it's definite critics, as it should, but perhaps that's just because it's so hard to define. The acting was mediocre, the script a bit overplayed but well made and the camera work quite well for the obvious small budget. So I'll give it high marks on these merits. There's one thing that I absolutely hate...The animal cruelty. No movie producer should ever feel the need to kill a cat on camera for shock value. That's just stupid, wrong, and should be punishable by prison time. I give this film a big fat ZERO for the use of several animals for death scenes. I can look past the pig slaughter, because you eat a pig after you kill it. But just wasting an animal for no reason? That's terrible. Torturing a human on camera, or smearing excrement on them, or whatever is fine because people have the cognition to understand what's happening, a cat does not. For the latter part of this review, I will never be supporting Marian Dora's work from this point forward. This is sad because I really like his work as an artist, but I cannot get behind art that harms animals for no reason. I give this a 5 star only on the merits it deserves, if it had been without the cruelty, I would have rated it far higher and I would be purchasing all of his work.

This film is visually unlike any I have ever seen. The cinematography is really good and the constant cut scenes of animals being killed in various ways is almost documentary-like and eye-catching. However, the main problem I found was that the main story arc didn't make much sense to me and was just a chance to show a lot of graphic violence and explicit sex. Although very little of the sex was erotic-- I'm not sure it was meant to be. It was very realistically shot --almost the same as in natural wildlife films--and not sensationalised with close-ups, music etc. The other problem for me was that the main characters were just too nasty and unlike-able.I have to admit that a lot of the scenes I saw, I never thought I'd ever see in a mainstream movie yet -- although if this is 'mainstream' is open to debate and that it is in a European film makes sense. Never will such a film be made in Hollywood and then get a general release. Never!I never thought I'd see a scene of a man shitting on to a woman in a non-extreme-porn movie although the scene lasts a second. Then the man pulling apart the young girl's buttocks and licking her arsehole and she defecating on him....the bearded man pissing on the woman at his feet...The most disturbing thing for me was the violence done to the women. That I found much more unwatchable than the sexual deviancy. With proper editing this could have been a masterpiece but it just remains an interesting exercise in shocking the viewer. But the director must be congratulated for daring to push boundaries. After all, we all urinate, defecate, have sexual fetishes, ejaculate --so why does cinema have to glamorise them? Just show them naturally. Seeing someone defecating is much less offensive than seeing someone's head being blown up or torture-porn.

With its focus on audiovisual composition, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA essentially is an emotional experience. Not enough, the complexly developed story also stretches out to themes of friendship, passion, revenge and death wish. This assumes intense preoccupation with all the multiple layers of the movie. In aesthetic, tender images the stunned audience witnesses events that blurred the frontiers between reality and fiction probably already during the shooting. Just apparently in contradiction the events are accompanied by citations of German contemporary history, which gives Marian Dora's work a powerful intellectual historical basis. The movie's structure is similar to the baroque cathedral which gets a central role in the movie: The story and (only on the first sight) marginal details get mirrored like a symmetry axis and seem to be the counterpart of the leading characters destiny.A personal work of director Marian Dora, the movie defies all formal conventions of storytelling. In nearly all scenes the movie breaks up to the audience's expectations. Established viewing and thinking habits as well as generally accepted and provided moral patterns are getting destroyed and stay unusable. If comparisons are appropriate at all, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA has its place between the work of Jodorowsky or Pasolini. However, the movie can't deny its German roots and openly admits its highly controversial underground cinema status: Poetic, radical, original, unwieldy and impossible to forget.