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Actresses Liliana Amuat, Henriette Confurius in "The Girl and the Spider"
Photo: Salzgeber
If you allow yourself to be guided by Sigmund Freud, you have to come to the conclusion that "The Girl and the Spider" is probably the scariest film that has been made in German-speaking countries for a long time.
The title alone ...
In fact, the second film by the Swiss twin brothers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher is about a friendship that may end and two relationships that may begin.
If you had to dock the film to a genre, it would most likely be romantic comedy.
Fear - except for spiders - would therefore be completely out of place.
And yet there is a lot that is literally scary about this film, at least according to Freud.
In his essay "Das Unheimliche" from 1919 he deduced how the uncanny and the homely are related: What was previously familiar and homely emerges and becomes uncanny and strange through splits, duplications and suspicious coincidences.
This also somewhat outlines the Zürcher method.
In their films, of which there are only two, but which already form a completely separate system of reference, they stage everyday things in such a way that they suddenly appear unfamiliar.
A child who screams, a cigarette being put out, a large family dinner.
Not much more happened in »The Strange Kitten«, the joint graduation film from 2013 at the Berlin Film School DFFB.
And yet you had to rub your eyes afterwards to check whether you had really seen what you had just seen.
Because either events were extracted from their everyday context - such as the child's cry that you didn't know where it came from.
Or they were put together to create patterns that you couldn't figure out spontaneously: What is the point of all the yellow accents?
The new pierces everyday life
In the end, "The Strange Kitten" was not completely puzzling.
On closer inspection and listening, it became clear how the Zurichers created their beautiful irritations with an over-accentuated sound editing or a camera that suddenly switched from adult to child eye level.
The amazement at so much directorial perfection in the very first film didn't detract from that.
At the same time, you could be sure that with so much obsession with detail, the next film would take a while.
In the end it was eight years.
“The girl and the spider” begins with something that becomes uncanny: Lisa (Liliana Amuat) moves out of the shared flat with Mara (Henriette Confurius). Mara half-heartedly helps her friend furnish the new apartment. She clearly does not share their anticipation for the unknown. But the new forces Mara and literally pierces her everyday life. A compressed air drill works the street in front of the house, a pencil pierces the paper cup with red wine that is served at the flat share dissolution party, and the eyes of craftsman Jan (Flurin Giger) unexpectedly hit her close to the heart.
The grim melancholy of a person who does not want to give in to the passage of time permeates the film.
But on the soundtrack, Eugen Doga's friendly, urgent waltz "Gramofon" signals from the start: Life will go on, no matter what Mara has to complain about.
And a lot of life happens in the 99 minutes of "The Girl and the Spider".
Lisa's mother (Ursina Lardi) and the head of the craftsmen's group (André Hennicke) start a flirtation, the last party in the shared apartment is celebrated, the neighbor from below steps between Mara and Jan.
All of this has been atomized by the Zürchers, i.e. broken down into the smallest unit.
A flirtation, for example, is told with two brief glances.
Just as much attention is paid to the dog that whirls around the house and the family pictures that are standing around with the neighbors.
Is that still the life shown here or something completely different?
You can never be entirely sure about »The Girl and the Spider«, and that makes the film scary in the best sense of the word.
Everything is close to the familiar and yet a decisive step away from it.
