"Cibrâil" is a German movie from 2011, so this one had its 5th anniversary last year. It is a German production in the German language and the writer and director is Tor Iben. For him, it was his very first full feature film (of so far 3, soon), so he certainly has been pretty prolific since then. And most (if not all) of his works have a bit of a homosexual background. Here this one plays a bigger role compared to his follow-up film "The Passenger". The title character is a man who discovers his apparently true sexual identity when a relative of his girlfriend comes by from Italy. Okay, this subject has been done many many times and honestly it is neither new nor fresh anymore. So movie makers who still stick to this pretty unrealistic story of discovering they are gay (or bi) without any further implication (hey it's more effective and spectacular this way, who cares about authenticity) earlier have to deliver in other areas in terms of character development. This is also not the case here. The film moves extremely slowly from start to finish and almost nothing ever happens. Or I should maybe say nothing that makes sense. Unluckily for Iben, he also did not get any help from the trio of protagonists in here as most of the actors are really bad and there are scenes when the line delivery is extremely painful to watch. One scene with Martina Hesse comes to mind immediately when she talks about the cousin departing again. Painful stuff. I see she has not appeared in films since then until a recent Tatort episode, but I truly hope she managed to step things up since then. It's been a while. So eventually what we have here is the first work from a rookie filmmaker and even if you expect very little in terms of quality, your expectations will still be not fulfilled at all. Plus the cast consists of people that should not focus on acting, or at least shouldn't back then. The only significant thing about this film is how significantly messy it is and I am glad it was over after 70 minutes roughly. Luckily, Iben improved and I liked his follow-up film that I already mentioned more than this one here. Feel free to check out my review for that one too. As for this one here, highly not recommended.
Review of The Visitor
