User Reviews

"Die Maschine" or "The Machine" is a German 11-minute live action short film that was already shot back in 2014, but took 3 long years to get released just the other day. Director and co-writer is Jaschar Marktanner, who you can see very early on in a little cameo. But this film is not really about him or about the female protagonist (an environmentalist, who sure did not expect what she was running into here) or the machine. It is about Dieter Rupp's turn in the center of it all, even if everybody and everything, including the application in the title, are of course closely related to his character. You can see his decade-long experience constantly as he brings the character of Dr. Vogt to life here. Aside from that performance, I think what is most worth seeing thios fore is the atmospheric approach and with that I am not really referring to those fast hypnotic moments that felt like taken out of Requiem for a Dream, but rather the slow chilling action, the soundtrack and the different colors. The actual plot and story occasionally fall a bit behind compared to the film's style, but it's never so unequal that you would call it style over substance. It does what it needs to do for a film with this running time and Rupp's performance especially makes it worth seeing. Frequently with short movies you have the problem that the entire thing could work as part of a full feature film, but not as a standalone film itself. This is not the case here I would say. The introduction is solid explaining the overall context and the credits roll in at the right moment. It's a film that will probably not be seen by as many people as it should be, but take your chance if you get a hand on it. It's nothing truly extraordinary, but still worth checking out and I give it a thumbs-up.