Like Josephine Decker's recent "Madeline's Madeline", Katharina Wyss's debut "Sarah Plays a Werewolf" is also about a teenage girl who really only discovers herself when being someone else and although set around a theatre class, Wyss' film isn't so much about the process of acting as it is about getting inside the skulls of its characters and in particular inside the troubled mind of Sarah, (a terrific Loane Balthasar). The title might suggest a piece of schlock-horror but you can tell quite early on that this is going to be a much darker, psychological piece, it's violence very subtly applied as it slips only occasionally into fantasy.
Where Decker's film smacked of 'The Method' this Swiss movie feels much more radically 'realist' while the brilliance and depth of Balthasar's performance is alarmingly not like 'acting' at all. This is a rigorous, very European film and it gives us a very different picture of teenage angst than we are used to seeing in American or even British cinema. In the end, it is a horror film and one that will certainly evoke "Carrie" but without the bloodletting and flying daggers. The horrors Sarah experiences are the horrors of being a lonely, if very talented, child with too much imagination and too much time to sit and brood in her insular, almost incestuous, family and unlike DePalma's "Carrie" this Sarah really will chill you to the bone.
Where Decker's film smacked of 'The Method' this Swiss movie feels much more radically 'realist' while the brilliance and depth of Balthasar's performance is alarmingly not like 'acting' at all. This is a rigorous, very European film and it gives us a very different picture of teenage angst than we are used to seeing in American or even British cinema. In the end, it is a horror film and one that will certainly evoke "Carrie" but without the bloodletting and flying daggers. The horrors Sarah experiences are the horrors of being a lonely, if very talented, child with too much imagination and too much time to sit and brood in her insular, almost incestuous, family and unlike DePalma's "Carrie" this Sarah really will chill you to the bone.