Nekromantik

1987, Germany, Directed by Jorg Buttgereit

Colour, Running Time: 75 minutes

Review Source: DVD, R1, Barrel; Video: 1.33:1, Audio: DD Mono

Amassing a notable degree of underground notoriety in the late eighties, Nekromantik was/is a film that refused to hold back in any sense, whether referring to its onscreen depiction of visceral gruesomeness, its rarely explored concept, or the downright bleakness of the story at hand. Rob is a bit of a loser who can’t hold down a job - somehow he just doesn’t fit in with the average group of people, of which there are surreptitious reasons for. His current role as ‘street cleaner’ involves removal from site of dead bodies after various unexpected incidents such as car accidents, suicides, accidental murders, etc. What his workmates don’t know is that he thieves bits of bodies (e.g. internal organs) whenever he sees the opportunity, taking them home to store in jars of formaldehyde. Surprisingly, he’s not a loner - his live-in girlfriend shares the same morbid passion. And this passion is granted vivid manifestation when he manages to get a complete corpse back to the apartment - the couple proceed to make sickening love to each other and the putrescent mess that lies on the bed. But his antisocial nature at work soon gets him an instant dismissal, causing his girlfriend some stress at the fact that he won’t now be able to obtain fresh cadavers and the like - she swiftly departs taking the rotting body with her. Rob’s mind descends into a turmoil and his life spirals further out of the grasp of whatever control he ever even had.

This film is something that you view very differently as you age, with opinion shifting between perversely screwed up entertainment to feeling downright depressed at the atrocities on sight and in mind. The infamous corpse-fu**ing sequence is shot with various optical effects obscuring the activity somewhat but there is enough there to render it pretty horrific (if one must be a necrophiliac then surely it would be more pleasant to get hold of a body that wasn’t rotting down to the bone!), and as it remains hung on the wall between bouts of ‘love’ making its dirty fluid drips into bowls beneath - with that and the jars of internal organs, etc, littering the shelves, the place must reek to Hell. Rob’s slide further into existential instability is accompanied and symbolised by interspersions of animal violence (the virtually unwatchable slaughter and skinning of a rabbit) and dreams where two lovers run through a field in slow motion tossing intestines to one another. All of this is accompanied with some of the most downbeat and devastating acoustic music ever heard on film: this stuff brings you spiritually to your knees. Rob’s destruction of the cat he buys to appease his girlfriend (thankfully the death not actually visible in this instance) is enough to break your soul. The eventual and inevitable resolution of his predicament of lost love is something you’ll never have seen in cinema before, and you’ll hope never to see again. The message seems to be that Life is stripped down to its primordial essentials and there is no God in the universe and no saviour from our journey to death and the decomposing shambles we are doomed to become afterwards. Admittedly amateurish in places, Nekromantik is nevertheless not a film any sensitive person is likely to enjoy, but it does elevate itself to the level of the unforgettable with its sheer audacity, visceral intensity, guts (no pun intended), and utterly bleak nihilism.

Barrel’s DVD was released around 2001 and remains the sole disc worth picking up, though it’s long out of print. Presenting the fullframe version of the film about as well as possible on home video (it was shot on Super 8 so I doubt even Blu-ray could do any better with this primitive material) the image is as clear as it needs to be, especially if, like me, you originally experienced this film on bootleg VHS tape in horrendous condition. There are also loads of extras present (including one of Buttgereit’s insane 8mm shorts) making this a true collector’s edition. Not a film for the masses, or even the majority of horror fans, but something that has stamped its dirty mark on humanity and, for better or worse, remains indelibly in the minds of all who have witnessed it.