The film is purely an idea: »We might as well be dead«
Photo: HEARTWAKE
The Roman poet Juvenal wrote that it is difficult not to write satire, but it is difficult because the thought is so obvious that it is easy. Somewhere behind the forest is the Phoebus house. It is an apartment building surrounded by golf course and grounds and the grounds are fenced. Moving in here takes luck, a spotless resume, and something that can be used as a weapon on your way through the woods. That’s why everyone wants to go into the Phoebus house, for safety’s sake, and the interviews are life-and-death ones.
“Don’t you know how difficult it is to raise a child out there?” asks the applicant, whose husband is about to drop to his knees, wringing his hands, in front of security guard Anna. Outside, that’s where the world ends, but in the Phoebus house they look out for you: “Warning! Walk slowly! Danger of injury!« warns the sign in the foyer, and jokes, even at the expense of others, are not so welcome either. “To make fun of the suffering of others is antisocial, immoral and thoughtless,” Anna prays to delinquents, because after all, Phoebus is the nickname of Apollo, not Dionysus.
Anna has a teenage daughter who lives in the bathroom because she thinks she has second sight: “If I get out, we’re all lost!” No, no one is allowed out, because freedom is the price of security; if security is not freedom. In any case, Anna steals a decorative angel during a patrol. And as is the case in closed, paranoid communities: they become fascist at the slightest disturbance, form a local militia, beat up the innocent oddball, “evaluate” the tenants, and Anna says nothing. Because Anna is a Polish Jew. Whereby: Do you pay rent in the Phoebus house? Do you buy in? What are the people working there and where?
»We might as well be dead« by Natalia Sinelnikova insists on its abstractness; the film is purely an idea, and the idea is bad because it is transparent and used. And the fact that one should only have a vague idea of the world from which they so tightly separate themselves here doesn’t help either. The construction is as sparse as the house, which from the inside looks like a retirement home that is no longer brand new, and God knows how symbolic that can of course be, but it only reflects on a film that is on display values - or let’s say: aesthetics – renounced in favor of its completely banal message, worthy of a middle school theater club.
The related cinema dystopia »Elysium« (2013) was at least star and effect cinema, professional work. »We could just as well be dead«, on the other hand, starting with the evocative title, is film school crap that Jörg Schüttauf, the only actor with a familiar face in the ensemble, cannot save. After a minute it’s clear what all this is supposed to be about, nothing else happens, and then it wants to be over and done with, and almost desperately you cling to the comparatively original interpretation that this is self-deprecatingly about the colorlessness and lack of humor of your own, like as » milieus accused of being «hypermoral». But it also doesn’t matter what the film wants to tell us, because it has no language and it won’t be funny either. Because where is the humor supposed to come from in a closed world of the humorless? In Phoebus House they are proud that their system has no gaps, but this “outstanding debut” according to the »New York Times« is just as nailed, namely strictly parabolic educational kitsch. Unless you wanted to understand the deeply tormenting, dead, cruelly underchallenging the viewer as a nod from the meta-level, when the bourgeois hell is not deconstructed, but imitated. The film relentlessly conveys what it’s like to spend your life in the Phoebus house, and those who absolutely want to can give it credit for that.
»We might as well be dead«: Germany 2022. Director: Natalia Sinelnikova. Book: Natalia Sinelnikova, Viktor Gallandi. With: Ioana Iacob, Pola Geiger, Jörg Schüttauf. 96 min. Start: 29.9.
