Sooo...
I don’t know what to do with this film. I didn’t watch it so much as cringe at it. More than anything, Nekromantik reminds me of Georges Bataille’s novella Story of the Eye, about two young lovers obsessed with bodily fluid and sexual congress with the dead. That’s basically what this film is, and it’s about as hard to digest as that book. This was a grueling endurance test; it dares you to keep watching. It gleefully skirts the lines between artful transgression, pornography, and b-movie schlock, often all at once. I’m sure there’s any number of ways to interpret this film, especially in the context of 1987’s West Germany – is it a German answer to the Italian Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, condemning the state for not coming to grips with its not-too-distant Nazi past? A proto-Funny Games, damning and indicting the audience for their bloodlust (emphasis on lust), yet still presenting it to them anyway? (The scene where our main character visits a cinema to watch a rampantly misogynistic and ugly slasher film while the theater-goers gaze bemusedly and make out would seem to support this.) Violently ugly, unapologetically gross, yet lyrical and poetic, Nekromantik is my new benchmark for confrontational art. Just don't ask me I actually like it, because I don't have an answer.
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