DER TODESKING
Dir. Jorg Buttgereit, 1990
Germany, 80 min.
In German with English Subtitles

Seven days, seven stories of suicide as told through Jorg Buttgereit’s grainy 8mm lens. On Monday a lonely man circles endlessly around a room filled with hand-drawn pictures of fish before drowning himself in his tub, on Thursday the camera explores the outskirts of an empty bridge while dozens of suicides flash across the bottom of the screen, and so on and so forth throughout the week – all while a rotten corpse decomposes in a morbid framing device linking the tales.
Featuring a stand-out score from Buttgereit go-to Daktari Lorenz, DER TODESKING replaces the juvenile transgressiveness of it’s necrophile predecessor with a darker and more sobering look at mental illness. Helped in no small part by an continually inventive camera language and a sharper focus the repressed traumas of German society, this is perhaps Buttgereit’s most fully realized effort.