If Last Tango in Paris, American Pie and the pastrami sandwich episode of Seinfeld didn’t do enough to warn us about the dangers of food-related eroticism, along comes the Australian director Cate Shortland’s psycho-sexual thriller Berlin Syndrome. Early in the piece the protagonist Clare (Teresa Palmer) is moseying through the titular city when she bumps into a charming, fruit-wielding local named Andi (Max Riemelt) who, presumably reciting from an obscure book of suggested come-ons, drops the following humdinger: “Do you like strawberries?”
The line works and the pair are soon flirting in a local garden where said berries are grown. For a while, Berlin Syndrome feels less like a thriller than something directed by Sarah Polley: wistful and melancholic, with a Leonard Cohen song about brandy and death waiting on the soundtrack. The director continues the pattern of hipsterish flourishes that have been strewn throughout her three features so far. Her 2004 debut Somersault begins with vision of frosty grass; Lore with a bathtub and hair; and now Berlin Syndrome with hands fidgeting on a train.
After a second flirtation at a bookstore, where the couple converse as Andi leafs through a volume about Gustav Klimt, they go on a proper date. The film’s tonal change eventually becomes apparent when Clare discovers the German is not just locking her inside his apartment and leaving to go to work as a schoolteacher for the day, but has set the place up so a person trapped in there could never escape.
On the evening of their first erotically charged embrace, performing oral sex in the bedroom, Andi observes Clare trying to keep her volume down and says, reassuringly, “Nobody can hear you.” It’s a clever touch from the screenwriter Shaun Grant, who penned Jasper Jones and Snowtown and here adapts Melbourne author Melanie Joosten’s 2011 novel of the same name. That line means one thing in the context of a bedroom hookup; quite another in a story about abduction.
The strawberry-distributing ghoul has decked out his abode with unbreakable soundproof windows and has a huge bolted lock on the door. Clare experiences a slasher film-like revelation when she picks up her mobile phone and discovers the sim card has been removed, then finds an album of Polaroids suggesting in no subtle terms she may not be Andi’s first victim.
The “Berlin” in the title is in lieu of “Stockholm”, with Shortland encouraging audiences to contemplate whether the protagonist is falling for her captor or is perhaps feigning affection in service of a long term-strategy to get out of there. It is also what Joosten reportedly described as a “delicious metaphor”, no doubt referring to the juxtaposition of the city’s history (it is based in an abandoned part of the former East Berlin) with the terrible restrictions imposed by Andi’s apartment.
Like last year’s bolder, more ambitious and significantly smaller-budgeted thriller Observance, I got notes of early Roman Polanski, such as 1965’s brilliant Repulsion – though perhaps more in aspiration than achievement. Having the nous and discipline to pull off that kind of claustrophobic, oxygen-depleting, walls-coming-in psychological thriller is no easy task. Shortland makes it harder on herself with the travelogue-style setup, and through her choice of handheld-heavy camerawork from the cinematographer, Germain McMicking (who shot Holding the Man and Partisan), which frequently cheats the film out of tight, interesting compositions.
Kudos to the team – including the production designer, Melinda Doring – for making a shabby old reclining armchair look all kinds of creepy, as though it sucks up your soul when you sit on it. For a moment there I got acid flashbacks to the cut-rate 1977 horror Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. My mind certainly had time to wander; once Berlin Syndrome settles into its captor/captive cat-and-mouse game, the big question naturally concerns what will happen next. The short answer is nothing for a long time, a potentially tight and pacy hour and a half stretched out to a languishing 116 minutes.
A saving grace arrives in the form of two fine performances from the lead actors, twitchy and venomous in their own ways. Riemelt’s parlous presence arises from Shortland affording him moments of carefully picked silence, which he then fills with menace – while also making Andi needy. Palmer is even better. Those sad and smoky eyes are perfect for mystery and trauma: startlingly human, but with a sense she’s hiding something, somehow distorting her emotions into a strange and surreal canvas – like a figure from an Edvard Munch painting.
Is the point of the film that any apartment in any neighbourhood can house malicious captors and unthinkable grotesquery? Or that bad relationships can become totalitarian states, trapping our spirits? Berlin Syndrome certainly aspires for something more meaningful than a cautionary message about the dangers of accepting fruit from strangers. An ambitious project, for sure – but also uneven, drawn-out and repetitive.
• Berlin Syndrome opens in cinemas around Australia on 20 April
