Review of All of a Sudden

"Auf Einmal" or "All of a Sudden" is a German movie from 2016 that was released fairly recently on DVD, so it is still pretty fresh. It runs for 110 minutes and and is perhaps the most known work by writer and director Asli Özge and she also received a solid deal of awards attention for it, for example at the Berlin International Film Festival. The cast includes names like Hülk, Jentsch, Zischler, Gersak (a bit of a personal favorite), Heyer and more, actors that German film buffs have probably come across in other projects. And while there are some that left me fairly unimpressed and that I like more in other works (Jentsch especially, but that also had to do with the way her character was written), I would not necessarily say that the acting is a problem here, let alone the biggest problem. I do believe that the film is struggling with the direction he takes. At times, it tries to be a character study mostly about the protagonist played by Hülk while at other times it tries to be a mystery movie and wants to take the audience on an enigmatic journey with what really happened to the dead girl. Murder? Suicide? An accident? Anything else? The problem is that Özge never really decides which of the two paths she really wants to take and the consequence is something that we would call in Germany here "wischi waschi". Actually the Rammstein closing song is also a piece that summarizes this movie very well. It tries to be bold, but never really manages to be a creative achievement at all. And it struggles with the tone and atmosphere in general. By no means, this film is a failure and it has some fairly strong moments too, at least occasionally, but in terms of quantity these are also far away from what you would want in a film that is closer to 120 minutes than to 90 minutes. What else is there to say. The story about the death is nothing new or original really and has been done in many other films with better focus and attention to detail. So yeah I think the negative outweighs the positive here and I don't think the awards attention is appropriate. It is not one of the better German films of 2016. Not recommended.