Continuing our series of writers highlighting hidden films is a recommendation for a nuanced German drama about the aftermath of a sexual assault
Last year, Ari Aster was praised for setting the horrors of Midsommar in bright, sunlit scenes: by refusing the easy scares of nighttime, the director succeeded in making something especially disquieting, a paranoid waking nightmare. Although All Is Well, the debut feature film by German director Eva Trobisch, is not a horror film, it similarly thumbs its nose at the register of darkness you might expect from a drama about somebody recovering from a
Sexual Assault. Janne, the young woman in question, never names her attacker; never seeks revenge; doesn’t have a moment of reckoning – and, as she attempts to continue her life as usual, Trobisch frames her in solidly neutral whites. The pale workshirts she wears; sunlight through white blinds; white bricks at Janne’s trendy office; computer light on her face; the walls of a hospital clinic: it’s as if the world surrounding Janne is undisturbed. That unsullied universe only heightens the weight of the torment we know she is going through.
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