User Reviews

"5 Frauen" or "5 Women" is a German full feature film from 2016, so neither really new nor old and this one was written and directed by Olaf Kraemer, his most recent directorial effort, but he is a more prolific writer anyway. Still there is nothing truly in his body of work that should make you curious about these slightly under 100 minutes here, maybe the Uschi Obermaier film the least, but then one is also only really known for how controversial the protagonist is, not because it is particularly good. Now back to this one here of course. The title already gives away that there is a really female centered-cast and story line. We have a quintet of women (friends) spending some quuality time together in the form of a short holiday to France. Well, "quality time" because things of course get pretty heated and messy, sadly not in a way where you could call it a quality character study, but eventually it is just all about who is sleeping with him. Really weak character writing honestly, especially for females which people look at so much these days when it comes to creating powerful and interesting female character. Nothing like that to be found here. Instead it is the story of a group of women acting at least ten years younger than they are. So it is a bit of a delight finally something happens when there is somebody burgling their place (what a coincidence) and they kill him. Now this is already where reasonably they would have called the cops and clearly the writer was thinking the same, so he came up with the pretty stupid explanation that the French hate the Germans like over half a century ago and they would all go to prison for the rest of their lives if they talked to the police. As if this was not already nonsense enough, not much later the pretty attractive brother shows up, brother to the guy killed I mean and he is looking for his sibling unknowingly what the girls did to him. As a consequence of course, there is some catfighting, lots of jealousy who gets to spend time with the hunk etc. everything really you would not want in a movie. All superficial and shallow I'd say. Even France is not looking half as beautiful in this film as it should. And finally the perhaps negative icing on the cake is that one character was apparently raped (if we can trust the tattoo) by the brother years ago, which is another highly unrealistic coincidence we have here. But oh well. Enough now. As you can see from my review there are definitely moments, and not too few, when this film hits rock-bottom and only deserves 50% of my 4-star rating. Still the tension can be felt at times and honestly the actors are doing a somewhat tolerable job with the messy script they were given. The strange singing moment (of course lets express this way that one character is free-spirited and artistic, even if she is nbot a good singer - the cringe) or of course also two women briefly making out (no way they could exclusde that huh? it adds so much to the story) are among the lowlights here. I am actually not surprised they did not get more famous actresses to appear in this film given the screenplay. Highly disappointing, especially looking at how long Kraemer has been in the industry already. I have a feeling he won't find quality in the future either. No clue what Bavaria saw in this film awards-wise. It is not good, the rating here on imdb is pretty accurate. Thumbs-down. Not recommended. Watch someting else instead.