Der freie Wille (2006)

	Directed by: Matthias Glasner	COUNTRY Germany GENRE Drama ENGLISH TITLE The Free Will NORWEGIAN TITLE Den frie vilje RUNNING TIME 163 minutes
	Produced by: Frank Döhmann Matthias Glasner Christian Granderath Jürgen Vogel
	Written by: Judith Angerbauer Matthias Glasner Jürgen Vogel

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Theo	Jürgen Vogel
Nettie	Sabine Timoteo	½
Sascha	André Hennicke	½
Netties's vater	Manfred Zapatka

Review

Matthias Glasner shoots his film through a gritty lens with handheld video cameras. He sticks them right in the actors' faces, and lets them stay there – through some of the ugliest and most humiliating acts the human race is capable of. Der freie Wille is an extremely demanding motion picture. It wants nothing more than to exhaust the viewer, jab at us for 163 minutes until we can no longer hold our guard up. It doesn't discuss its themes, it just presents them to us, but it does it with an enormous intensity. Glasner's achievement is the power of his thesis; wanting to present the rapist as a man with a primal, inner urge he desperately wants to control, but simply cannot. He is presented as a stripped-down human being. He asks us to understand him, though his actions are never justified. Der freie Wille grabs hold of you in a way that makes it impossible not to consider matters from every angle.

The question is whether Glasner succeeds in his effort and objective. The trouble with the film's intensity is that it also threatens to wear down our sympathy and emotional commitment. The film is fundamentally pessimistic. Glasner becomes so intimate with his characters that he doesn't allow them to breathe. His film remains uneconomical, unsharply edited, and unevenly paced. The dialogue (which often is almost absent) is at times too motivated by thematic effect; it alternates between clinging to and diverging from realism.

Glasner's conclusion is effective and poetic, but he would have gotten a more potent result had he rationalised his film more. The acting is fine, especially by Sabine Timoteo whose transformation of her character Nettie is completely believable and stirring. I think the character of Theo would have profited from more expressive acting from Vogel, though he delves into his character neck and crop. Der freie Wille is a completely absorbing film. It has total commitment to its themes, and it handles them with respect in an impressively perceptive way. With a slightly less monotonous tone, and perhaps better cutting, it could also have reached our spine to the degree Glasner wants.