Don't mind me, I'm just here for the... What the actual... Get your hands off her, you [expletive deleted]!
This review contains spoilers for this film and all four seasons of Stranger Things aired to date. When Sadie Sink leads a movie, some things are inevitable.
In a rather fun coincidence, the trailer for O'Dessa dropped on the same day I started watching this.
Anyway, so Mazzy Monroe (Sadie Sink), a high school student from California (without a skateboard) is sent to Berlin where her father (Eric Bana) lives and teaches to spend a semester there. Basically to improve her grades. The teaching is in English, which is handy because she doesn't speak a word of German.
Dad is a social psychologist and has a friend called Nina who works for the BfV, Germany's domestic intelligence agency. She calls him along to a mass suicide. As you do.
While Mazzy is making her way from the airport, she meets a cute guy. Who invites her to join a society that turns out to be a cult...
This is one of those movies that has a good idea, but rather fails in the execution, then breaks down like a Trabant at the end. This movie was filmed in Berlin, a city I have been to on three different occasions, so I had some fun location spotting.
Anyway, onto the notes:
- Therapy through an opaque glass door is rather an unconventional method of doing it.
- German is a good language to do crazy in. The accents are generally a good one as well. Most of them.
- Sadie Sink's first word in this movie is an F-bomb when she misses a train. In Stranger Things, she never goes that high even when facing Vecna. This is implying that the Berlin U-Bahn is worse than him and BVG might not be happy bunnies about that. Ahem.
- Mazzy should be fined for her butchering of the German language and her baggage solution needs work.
- So, you skip picking up your daughter from the airport to attend a mass suicide scene. Nice priorities, Eric Bana.
- Mazzy (which is an actual name) is far sparkier than Max.
- People in movies need to time their lectures better - they never seem to finish them in time.
- In my typical foreign holiday, the locals speak better English than I do the local language. When I was in Milan, I looked so much like a tourist, they initiated the conversation in English!
- It's a shell, it's dead. It's literally rubbish.
- Max Mayfield wouldn't do selfies as camera phones weren't a thing. Well, photograph self-portraits were, but it's not her style.
- If you have magic mushrooms on you, are you a fun guy?
- Mazzy doesn't need to worry about German Vecna. She's got the modern equivalent of a Walkman.
- She's a real potty mouth though.
- Can you not afford chairs on a BfV salary?
- Isn't that comment about mass consciousness like a discussion of well, a certain Austrian man?
- We see Deutsche Welle, which is a real German news network.
- It's a techno nightclub in Germany. The sort of place Sydney Bristow would hang about back in the day. Instead, we get Mazzy channelling that character with her outfit, completed with see-through shirt. This isn't Max at all...
- That is one nasty toilet, even before Mazzy pukes into it.
- We get a former Berlin Wall guard tower turn up in the scene where Mazzy is kidnapped.
- This is harder to watch because Vecna is fantasy and this is something that could actually happen. Sadie Sink does suffering really well. Anyway, Vecna would raise an eyebrow at this. If he had one.
- Is there ever a tasty hangover cure?
- I think the director might be Sadie-istic.
- Obligatory Berlin landmark shots, check!
- Oh, great! Nina's a baddie - and she set the whole thing up. Never trust the petite brunette!
- The whole confrontation between Mazzy's father and the cult leader is rather "cackly", marking the moment the movie ends up going into the proverbial lake.
- Lake Liepnitz is a real lake and looks to be quite nice in RL.
- So, we get someone decide to make Sadie sink?
- Suicide by self-immolation? Not a great way to go. Also, not something associated with Germans.
- Pretty sure you can't design a hallucinogen to have a specific effect.
- It's less running up that hill, more floating in that lake?
- The movie basically just stops following Mazzy's rescue. The cult leader clears off and her videos are still out there. Pretty sure she'd have a European Arrest Warrant on her quicker than you can say "Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz"...
Conclusion
I sacrificed nearly 100 minutes of my life for this, so to speak. What could have been a very good movie is let down massively by its final act.
I do not apologise for the puns. I will probably make more when O'Dessa comes out.
5/10
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