Angst

★★★★

(1983)

“…there’s an Austrian movie… it’s about a man killing a family just in order to go back to prison, where he felt better. It’s like a very dark, European version of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, but much more baroque in it’s filming. It was banned all over the world - even in France it was one of the last movies to be x-rated for extreme violence. I think it’s going to be rediscovered everywhere in the next few years.” 

This is Gaspar Noé (I Stand Alone, Irreversable, Enter the Void) discussing the technical cinematic influence of one of his favourite films, Gerad Kargl’s horrifically effective and dazzlingly shot Angst. As far as a plot synopsis goes there isn’t really too much point in elaborating. Noé has pretty much said it all and although the film’s concise 80 minute running time feels much much longer it’s as plain, bare boned, bullheaded and disturbing as you would expect a film so loved by this decade’s true infant terrible to be.

It presents such a pathetic, sad serial killer, devoid of any of the more common traits inherent in the killers of more recent cinema. He has no intelligence, does not leave fiendish clues to be solved by big brained policemen, there is no final twist, no epilogue and certainly no way to feel the slight tinges of admiration of character that one feels when watching Anthony Hopkins slobber down the glass in The Silence of the Lambs. The one thing our psychopath has got however is sheer blunt horror and uncertainty… and he isn’t afraid to use it.

Head wreckingly photographed by by Academy Award winner Zbigniew Rybczyński (who would oddly later shoot a video for John Lennon’s first of many re-releases of his classic Imagine) Angst manages to detach and horrify. The way Kargl perches his swaying camera over the head of our wandering unnamed killer (Irwin Leder) as he clumsily knocks off a family in a secluded suburban house in Austria is the definitive influence on Noé’s first three feature films and by far the most impressive aspect. It is a difficult ride, bumpy and swaying like you’re watching from a boat on rocky seas and so it should be.

Amped up and made all the more jarring by loud as hell sound design and synth score by Klaus Schulze (from Tangerine Dream) Angst is certainly not for the weak of stomach or anyone suffering from vertigo, but it is a fascinatingly dark, real time journey into pure horror.