§ 51 - Seelenarzt Dr. Laduner

This first scenes of this film suggest that the viewer will be taken somewhere between The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It rapidly descends to Agatha Christie territory-flat, uninspired Agatha at that. On the positive side, the acting and score are solid as is the direction, though the film is very `housebound' with all or most of the scenes indoors (with no remarkable sets). The tone of the movie is bland, including a bit of humor, but really needing some suspense or strong sense of paranoia. There is an attempt to portray mental illness as an entity whose grasp reaches further than the inmates in the asylum depicted here, but the mundane nature of the narrative undercuts this ambition. At best 6/10.