"Das weiße Kaninchen" or "The White Rabbit" is a German(-language) film from this year, actually it was shown on the small screen about a week ago, even if it received some awards attention at film festivals before that already. It runs for slightly under 1.5 hours and was directed by Florian Schwarz. The two writers are Michael Proehl and Holger Karsten Schmidt. In terms of the cast, despite being a big film buff, there are not many names in here that sound familiar. The exception is of course lead actor Devid Striesow. Julia Jäger may be known to some from the Oscar-winning short film "Spielzeugland" from 10 years ago and Lena Urzendowsky is the sister of Sebastian. Then again, the cast includes child actors for key parts, so no surprise that they aren't that famous and, like I said, it is a small screen movie, which usually does not have big stars in the cast, so Striesow is already as good as it gets.
This is the story of a girl who keeps meeting the wrong chat partners online. One is a teenage boy who has downright evil things in mind and the other is a fully-grown man, a teacher, who poses as a boy online and he actually may have good things in mind, namely protecting the girl from bad influence. Or is he really? I will not go into detail to avoid (further) spoilers. Yes the film is slightly over-the-top in terms of drama and it may be a bit too harsh about the online world because the predators are just really not many, to a level where you could almost call them non-existent. But for dramatic purpose, they did without the realism here and I don't really blame them. Striesow gives a good performance and the rest of the cast is fairly convincing too I guess. The film's biggest strength is really that you never know if Striesow's character is good or bad until the very end and this question is one that helps a lot in keeping the audience interested until the closing credits roll in. Also a nice ending somewhat, pretty inspired and absolutely not generic, even if again maybe not too much on the realistic side. But if you are not looking for a film and a story that could actually happen in real life and instead see it as a pure work of fiction, then you will probably enjoy the watch as much as I did. I give it a thumbs-up, definitely one of the better television films from 2016 and I can see why it seems to manage to get fairly popular pretty quickly. See it.
This is the story of a girl who keeps meeting the wrong chat partners online. One is a teenage boy who has downright evil things in mind and the other is a fully-grown man, a teacher, who poses as a boy online and he actually may have good things in mind, namely protecting the girl from bad influence. Or is he really? I will not go into detail to avoid (further) spoilers. Yes the film is slightly over-the-top in terms of drama and it may be a bit too harsh about the online world because the predators are just really not many, to a level where you could almost call them non-existent. But for dramatic purpose, they did without the realism here and I don't really blame them. Striesow gives a good performance and the rest of the cast is fairly convincing too I guess. The film's biggest strength is really that you never know if Striesow's character is good or bad until the very end and this question is one that helps a lot in keeping the audience interested until the closing credits roll in. Also a nice ending somewhat, pretty inspired and absolutely not generic, even if again maybe not too much on the realistic side. But if you are not looking for a film and a story that could actually happen in real life and instead see it as a pure work of fiction, then you will probably enjoy the watch as much as I did. I give it a thumbs-up, definitely one of the better television films from 2016 and I can see why it seems to manage to get fairly popular pretty quickly. See it.
