User Reviews

Agnes is a love romance movie in Berlin. Walter, an author in his middle age falls in love with a college student, who discuss about death with him. And Agnes asks him to write a novel about her. Walter writes a novel and after Agnes gets pregnant, he cannot distinct real from the novel. In the first thirty minutes, I thought this movie is a Horror movie. Agnes's eyes are really scared. She sometimes looks like a black-eyes demon in SPN. Her face is really scared except when she laughs. It makes me very anxious. It shows her mental vulnerability. It is although neither affair nor incest, we can expect Walter and Agnes can not be happy. I like this atmosphere in this movie, that something terrible can happen, something crucial can happen just after happy scene. This tragedy is not related to the novel. It happens just because they doesn't have enough conversation. A confusion of real and novel is worn-out but interesting theme. What special in Agnes is that Agnes who is wrote in a novel is more confused than Walter who writes a novel.

"Agnes" is a German movie from last year (2016). It runs for 100 minutes roughly and this already includes a great deal of closing credits, so around 90 minutes is probably more accurate. It is the most recent work by director Johannes Schmid and he is also one of several writers working on this project. The cast is not too known I guess. Even Odine Johne who plays the title character and Stephan Kampwirth, who plays the male co-lead here, are not exactly names that seem familiar to German film buffs, even if they both, especially Kampwirth, have really long careers. The consequence in this movie is also that I was never really impressed with the characters. The film is slowly drifting forward, but nothing ever happens, which is not really a problem if (and that's a huge "if") we get a convincing character study, but this isn't the case here either as when it felt realistic it never went under the surface of it all. It is pretty tough to put a finger on what the exact reason is why I did not enjoy this film too much. I am not saying at all that it is a failure or anything, but it's not even close to being good enough to an extent where I would recommend it and this includes pretty much all production values here. I also found it shocking how (even if it was definitely trying to make an impact there) emotionally unattached I felt during the entire movie. Maybe it was the bleakness. All in all, a thumbs-down. Watch something else instead.