Berlin Syndrome (2017)
Storyline
A passionate holiday romance leads to an obsessive relationship when an Australian photojournalist wakes one morning in a Berlin apartment and is unable to leave.
Directors
Cast
Trailer
Reviews
80
Australian director Cate Shortland (Somersault, Lore) takes a horror movie premise and imbues it with the knotty emotional complexity of a dysfunctional relationship psychodrama.
80
Between more trickily opaque stretches of character development, Shortland nails a handful of straight-up, nerve-shredding tension sequences, teasing a version of the film that might have tilted into full-bore horror.
80
Palmer’s performance is honest and brave (particularly given that she’s often just performing scenes alone), and Shortland deftly switches between locked-door thriller mode and more nuanced character work.
75
While some of the story’s turns can feel overtly manipulative, Shortland finds a bracing humanity in depicting the perverse situation of Stockholm syndrome.
75
This isn’t the kind of genre piece that everyone will warm to. Some might find the subject matter too bleak; others might wish it were pulpier. But on the whole, Berlin Syndrome is incredibly effective, while offering a perspective that these kinds of films usually lack. It gets to know the innocent, while rendering the evil banal.
