Berlin Syndrome (2017)

Berlin Syndrome arrives with the trappings of a serious European co-production and the disposition of a locked door. Cate Shortland directs Teresa Palmer through a holiday romance that curdles into captivity, and the film holds its nerve without reaching for a lesson. The camera stays close, the apartment stays cold, and Shaun Grant's screenplay keeps its attention fixed on the mechanics of confinement. There is no chorus standing by to explain what we should feel. The plexiglass windows do the arguing.

The picture has a female director and a female protagonist who spends most of the runtime in a room she cannot leave. A lazier reading would demand a thesis about gender. The film declines. Clare's ordeal is specific, physical, and stubbornly individual, and it is treated as a story about two people instead of a case study. The antagonist's nostalgia for the East Germany of his childhood is offered as private delusion, a man's cracked attempt to rebuild a utopia in a flat, not an argument about history. The cast is white, the setting is Berlin, and nobody pauses to remark on either fact. The dog does not survive, but nothing else is made to carry a message.

Genres like this one tend to resist the sermon. A hostage thriller has no room for a lecture because a lecture would require the characters to stop being held. The film's cultural temperature is that of a cellar in February. It is well made, grim, and entirely content to be about what it is about. As a specimen of contemporary social consciousness, it registers at nearly absolute zero, and we record that finding without complaint. A restrained vintage. The cellar is clean, the door is shut, and the sommelier has nothing further to add.