User Reviews

A young couple moves to a gated community (named Sechzehneichen), where soon the creative wife (a photographer) gets bored and the husband joins a secret mens' club. All the other wives seem strangely conservative and shallow. Sounds familiar? Yeah, this is basically a thinly veiled take on the Stepford Wives, just without any bit of humor or atmosphere, but instead filled with the sterile, unflinching and dry seriousness that makes watching a lot of our German films such a drag and a miserable experience. Filled with lots of ultra clear, cold shots of crappy neo- Bauhaus architecture... Some scenes were actually quite good (borrowing sometimes in style from Lynch, sometimes from Antonioni, but trying to emulate master filmmakers doesn't make you one), and like the source material it is still a good condemnation of posh suburbia and old boys clubs. But, no, I think I just could endure it because I'm used to even worse stuff on TV here...

4.5/10

"Sechzehneichen" is a German movie from 2012 made by Hendrik Handloegten and Achim von Borries. It is a small-screen release and as such it runs for the usual 90 minutes. German movie buffs will find familiar faces in here. Makatsch, Borgmann, Wilson, Taubman, Hosemann, Beyer and others have all appeared in relatively well-known movie. I was kinda surprised that Waschke, Makatsch's co-lead, was not really known to me in here. There is certainly a lot happening in this movie. A couple move to a new place and there seems to be something strange about the inhabitants. What follows next is about group sex orgy videos, missing children and a mysterious male-only cult that the protagonist quickly feels a temptation to be a part of. And honestly, all this is just the first half of the movie. Honestly, I wished they could have kept it down with all the plot developments and twists and instead tried to elaborate more convincingly on the supporting characters as they quickly feel really important, but I as an audience member hardly cared for any of them because they were just not written in a way I found convincing. This hurts the overall perception of the film in my opinion and while the acting is fine for the most part, the story just gets too absurd and over the top in my opinion. It feels like style over substance and becoming as sensational as possible. This one certainly could have needed more of the quietly convincing element. I give it a thumbs-down. Not recommended.