Das Privileg

The film starts promisingly. It stars some interesting newcomers who are already known from the successful German series Dark. The look of individual scenes is also good and reminds me of a mixture of Stranger things and dark.

However, the story starts to lose its thread after a few minutes. Thus, the story loses itself in a crude mixture of horror, black magic and some splatter. But nothing of it really seriously works. As a viewer, I did not experience any creepy feelings or scared at any point.

For my taste, there were clearly too many logic errors and implausible decisions by the characters. One happy coincidence follows the next.

Overall, the series seems conceptless and lovelessly designed. The best thing is the cast, even if all actors remain below their potential.

So many things happening in quick successions and I checked it's only 30 minutes in. The first 2/3 of the movie has a rapid pace like Geminis flipping through the channels (no offence to Geminis everywhere). Kinda like The Crimes of Grindelwald but even quicker.

It's a blend of everything from Resident Evil, Conjuring/Insidious, Us and the usual teenage drama stuff. However with everything happening this needs to double its runtime or a 4-6 episode miniseries. 100 minutes duration is just too rushed.

Production is exquisite, the locations and atmosphere feels authentic. Acting is good.

I'd recommend this if you want to take a break from glacially-paced shows and it should be a much better experience with a few glasses of Sancerre.

Think of The Faculty, made on the cheap.

This German film tells the story of a wealthy family, where tragedy seems to strike the youngsters.

It tries so hard to tick several genre boxes, horror, thriller, sci fi, and therein lies the problem, it dabbles rather than succeeds, if it had provided more by way of scares, it may have worked a lot better.

There's a lot going on, and it's not without interest, there is a mystery which draws your interest, the revelation may have you scratching your head.

Some decent special effects, it is well acted, and shows us some beautiful parts of the country, the scenes from the house are fabulous.

Overall, not terrible, not great, watchable, 5.5/10.

I'm so sorry but this left me so confused and disappointed. The plot was bad and the execution worse, clearly suffering from bad writing. I shouldn't have wasted my time on this.

They tried to go somewhere here. There was an attempt to create some sort of story, some sort of intensity...there were even rumors of a plot dare I say? But alas, it was all an illusion. Not sure what exactly the director was going for here but if it was a hot mess then - nailed it! Look, a film of this genre (well really one of any genre) can have all the promise in the world, but if it's thrown onto the screen haphazardly audiences are gonna eventually see it for the muddle that it is. In all fairness, if this was spun a different way, and in not such a dysfunctional fashion - maybe it would have succeeded better... Naja.