Auf Einmal

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ALL OF A SUDDEN (AUF EINMAL), screening at this year’s Cambridge Film Festival as part of the regular New German Cinema strand, begins with the aftermath of a party attended by some well-heeled young professionals. Karsten, the host, flirts with Anna, an enigmatic guest who has stayed behind after the other attendees’ departure. Her sudden collapse and mysterious death, and Karsten’s reaction, sparks a story of growing guilt, paranoia and resentment.

The film cuts jarringly from the apartment to Karsten running through the deserted streets. He reaches a local clinic, which turns out to be closed, and races back to find Anna has died in the interim. This fateful decision is one that is returned to time and time again, by friends, family, lawyers and investigators, Anna’s relatives, and Karsten himself. Aside from a brief moment of panic, no explanation is ever offered. We stay on the outside of Karsten’s head, and can only take his justifications as he presents them.

The early stretches of the film takes place among Karsten’s circle of friends, as recriminations fly and relationships are strained. It turns out that none of the attendees knew Anna, and each blames the other for her presence at their gathering.

Karsten’s parents mutter darkly about how “you can’t trust those people”.

It’s a familiar scenario to anyone who’s seen a David Fincher drama of bourgeois anxieties leading to violent ends. There are many scenes of icy politeness and passive-aggressive arguments taking place in fashionably distressed interiors.

There’s a class angle to the affair; Anna and her family are Russian Germans, recently arrived in the country and working in a nearby factory. Meanwhile, Karsten’s parents, representing the good burghers of the town’s civic life, mutter darkly about how “you can’t trust those people” and enlist a top lawyer to defend their son.

The power imbalance in Karsten’s family using their social privilege to insulate him from harm gradually lends all his interactions an undertow of hidden violence. A section where Karsten visits Anna’s husband takes the film out of its prosperous milieu to a working-class district of houses built in the shadow of the factory. The two men talk around the dead woman, exhibiting mutual incomprehension of each other’s lives. There is an extraordinarily tense scene involving nothing more than Anna’s young daughter entering the room and climbing on furniture while Karsten watches mutely.

The film takes a dark turn as any pretence of being a “wrong man” thriller evaporates.

Most of the film consists of a series of two-person conversations; Karsten is rarely off screen, and his friends, family and colleagues all have questions to ask him as the legal case continues. The question of who has the upper hand in each of these encounters is often indicated by editing and staging; evenly-matched rhetorical struggles are captured in single takes, but when Karsten is on the offensive the camera will cross-cut between him and his interlocutor.

After Karsten is cleared from legal sanction over Anna’s death, the film takes a dark turn as any pretence of being a “wrong man” thriller evaporates. He is still enigmatic and unreadable, but his experience has inspired him to seek retribution on the people who he feels abandoned him when his fate was uncertain.

It’s a disturbing portrayal of an arch-manipulator coming into being, with a certain ambiguity behind it: has his experience made Karsten a monster, or was he always capable of this? The final close-up, on his triumphantly smiling face, leaves us none the wiser.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8bmuKYWAPU