Schneekardinal

Beautiful surreal imagery, gruesome violence and dark atmosphere dominate the first and last ~5 minutes of the film.

I will not go into detail as to what happens inbetween but it would make your skin crawl in a different movie. Here, it is neither staged in gruesome detail nor cleverly implied, nor is the protagonist's emotional reaction to her mistreatment of particular interest to the film maker. The normalcy of it all and her overall numbness could in themselves be horrifying, but a thin plot about human pets, off-screen mass-murder and familial conflict keeps us from really getting to know Martha.

For the most part this was a disappointment and yet my interest in the work of Karim Ouelhaj is piqued. Those few minutes of genius bookending the film speak to a strong personal sense of style, the mark of a horror auteur.

On an overwhelmingly positive note: the noisy industrial soundtrack, especially the piece that plays during the end credits, is excellent. I do hope Karim embraces his more poetic tendencies and collaborates with Gary Moonboots on another film.

Moloch is a clever deconstruction of folk horror tropes, that keeps its meta-commentary in the subtext, focusing instead on character building and setting up scares. Don't ruin it for yourself by watching the spoiler-heavy trailer.

Enjoyment of the film depends entirely on our sympathy toward the film's protagonist Betriek and her family, consisting of her parents and young daughter. Thankfully, setting up these characters and their familial relationships competently and believably is one of the film's highest achievements compared to other horror films.

These three-dimensional characters inhabit a well-rounded script, that sets up its central themes from the beginning, always bringing the story back to certain ideas, slowly revealing the full gruesome picture. Similarly scares are set up well in advance, making for a spooky film with a lot of heart, atmosphere and a few very well executed shocks.

Old age is a scary thing: losing your mind to dementia, your body to decay, your home and your property as you settle into a residence for the elderly, and your social life, as your friends die and your children abandon you.

Andy Fetscher seems to be aware of this, as throughout the film his characters pay lip service to at least the abandonment of the institutionalized elderly by their families. Yet he does not find artistic potential in the existential horror of the situation, opting instead for a bizarrely German approach to the subject: a script that is 70% mainstream German family film of the era, very much in the vein of Til Schweiger, and 30% cookie-cutter zombie flick wherein the elderly stand in as walking corpses.

For lack of consistent tone, creative kills, competent gore or clear rules to the old people's uprising this does not work as a horror movie. Zombie movie cliches are employed to a satirical degree and the sound designer seems to be aware, as the ghostly howls and monstrous gargles with which the elderly are overdubbed seem to intentionally cross the border into comedy.

As a heartwarming family film this does not work for lack of conflict, comedy and any-dimensional characters. The protagonist family of four is ridiculously underwritten. A long-winded setup that centers on a sepia-drenched family wedding fails to equip any of them with goals or flaws, much less arcs - the film's greatest weakness, as its focus remains on familial interactions throughout.

A ridiculous finale wherein the powers of love and music save the day had the cinema in laughing fits and was by far the movie's most enjoyable moment. On another positive note, the film is well shot and well lit, set and costume design is competent and the synth-heavy musical score although heavy-handed wouldn't be out of place in a better zombie film. Old People's complete and utter failure as any kind of film comes down to its writing.

Writer and director Andy Fetscher recounted to us how he conceived of the film as he watched an old woman walk with a rollator, her stunted movements akin to those of the undead. A distasteful thought that should have been forgotten.