Melancholie der Engel

With its focus on audiovisual composition, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA essentially is an emotional experience. Not enough, the complexly developed story also stretches out to themes of friendship, passion, revenge and death wish. This assumes intense preoccupation with all the multiple layers of the movie. In aesthetic, tender images the stunned audience witnesses events that blurred the frontiers between reality and fiction probably already during the shooting. Just apparently in contradiction the events are accompanied by citations of German contemporary history, which gives Marian Dora's work a powerful intellectual historical basis. The movie's structure is similar to the baroque cathedral which gets a central role in the movie: The story and (only on the first sight) marginal details get mirrored like a symmetry axis and seem to be the counterpart of the leading characters destiny.

A personal work of director Marian Dora, the movie defies all formal conventions of storytelling. In nearly all scenes the movie breaks up to the audience's expectations. Established viewing and thinking habits as well as generally accepted and provided moral patterns are getting destroyed and stay unusable. If comparisons are appropriate at all, THE ANGELS' MELANCHOLIA has its place between the work of Jodorowsky or Pasolini. However, the movie can't deny its German roots and openly admits its highly controversial underground cinema status: Poetic, radical, original, unwieldy and impossible to forget.

This movie is as though a lesser talented director took a shot at breaking every taboo boundary that exists. Unfortunately, even with English subs the overall story lacks significantly (if it exists at all). Instead, you are left with a long movie collage of ramblings and animal torture, disturbing , and images of corpses littered around religious monuments with no true background or context. "Extreme" movie done poorly.

Holy hell, I've just watched this since I finally got my hands on the English subtitles.

The movie has little to no plot, backstory or continuity whatsoever. The only thing that saves this movie is the excellent way in which the director manages to depict decay, death and several mental illnesses. Unfortunately, these themes however, exist within a vacuum and feel disjointed as hell. Trying to understand this film objectively is largely a futile exercise. The movie feeds on the reaction of the viewer, that's the only power it has, which makes it extremely fragile.

I would suggest to skip this movie, or if you're just curious about the sheer madness on display, watch a few selected scenes, there are plenty, I assure you.

What the heck was this movie about? I can never ever get back the 2.5 hours that I used of my life to watch this movie. There is very little sequential movement through this story and the randomness and extensive focus on the irrelevant produced a waking coma that I may never recover from. The symbolism is impossible to follow and even the nudity, to include random ball and sack shots, was out of place and added little to the comprehensibility of this film. This would be a perfect film for someone on death row who had nothing else to live for and was anxious to end their life in confusion.

In 2009's "Melancholie der Engel" we are introduced to a group of people that have gathered in an old house and from there on the movie turns to a pretentious art house movie with disgusting imagery. There are quite a few scenes in this that are stomach-turning because they are so disgusting and disturbing that not everyone will even be able to watch this. The plot is weird and full of artsy stuff that was not entertaining at all. Every now and then something sick and disturbing happens to shock the audience just for the sake of it. In between there are quite a few nice shots and the overall cinematography was pretty good considering the low budget. However the overall result is way too long and unconvoluted. In the end some of the pictures will stay in the viewers head for a while but that's about the only achievement this movie gets. [3,0/10]