Fitzek filming "cut off": We slaughter a bestseller

At the beginning of a wild helicopter ride around the lighthouse of Heligoland: Every time, while the glaring gleam of light past the camera on the soundtrack, a powerful noise erupts, as if the massless light had a massive weight.

However, this moment of creative exaggeration is only a brief rally before "Cut Off" by director Christian Alvart has to start his thriller story: The daughter of the forensic doctor Paul Herzfeld (Moritz Bleibtreu) has disappeared, the trail leads to it Helgoland. But because the island can not be reached due to a blizzard from the mainland, Herzfeld has to delegate much of the investigation to the stranded on Heligoland comic artist Linda (Jasna Fritzi Bauer) - until finally the psychopathic grin Lars Eidingers pushes into the film to give the threat a focus.

photo gallery

5 pictures

"Cut off" is based on the "bestseller" by Sebastian Fitzek, as stated in the opening credits. By emphasizing this word, the film makes it clear that he alone feels committed to the goals of the popular: he does not want to be a work of art, he wants to work above all else. But this confession fades out that just the popular must take on a different form in each medium.

This is how a thriller in its novel form works, in particular, by constantly developing new theories about the course of a particular act - its emblematic scene is the shocking moment of revelation. As a film, however, the thriller mainly has a tension developed directly from sensory stimuli - its emblematic scene is the chase.

In this contradiction between the novelistic principle of escalating theory formation and the cinematic principle of sensual intensity, Alvart's film is increasingly eroded: "Cut off" feels so committed to the success of his bestselling original that he imposes a structure on his own goals as a film directly contradicts.

"Cut off"
Germany 2018
Director and screenplay: Christian Alvart
Performers: Jasna Fritzi Bauer, Moritz Bleibtreu, Fahri Yardim, Lars Eidinger, Barbara Prakopenka
Production: Regina Ziegler Filmproduction, Syrreal Entertainment, Warner Bros.
Rental: Warner Bros. GmbH
Length: 132 minutes
FSK: from 16 years
Start: 11th October 2018

Together with the forensic physician Herzfeld, the plot dives from one abandoned house to the next, revealing ever more brutal details about the background of the abduction. On the screen, however, this dynamic is also sown by the fact that it primarily takes place in verbal utterances, for the sequence of which the word "dialogue" would already be too dramatic a term. For there are no conflicts in these scenes, but above all information is unloaded.

Wordsome retold or explain traumatic events from the past, as the last unexpected discovery makes the previously formed theories appear in a new light. The pleasure in the abstract, which may cling to these passages in their novel form, however, can not be established in the film - the reports are not too small-scale, they are too subject to the constraints of a human utterance.

In the video: The trailer for "In love with my wife"

Video

Warner Bros.

But even in the increasingly uniform sequence of revelations, Alvart's efforts to create moments of affective intensity are evident again and again. He succeeds especially in the design of the snowstorm, whose wild goings-on adopts apocalyptic proportions. And he manages in the staging of the glibbernden and schwulstigen body masses, which are dissected with the dissecting knife and put on like rubber gloves from the inside out. These moments - and a brief, almost vicious fight scene towards the end of the film - reveal a lust for the visual, which is almost completely obscured in the rest of "Abgeschnitten" by the crime-style taken over from the literature.

So one wishes at some point that Alvart had the view of the forensic doctor a little more to own and emotionless of the lush body of the bestseller template cut all visually unproductive.