SNOWFLAKE **** Germany 2017 Dir: Adolfo J Kolmerer, William James. 121 mins
A “true story” about events in near-future Berlin, where a young woman (Xenia Assenza) and a failed British bodyguard (David Masterson) seek the killers of her parents, while a pair of endearing Turkish outlaws (Erkan Acar, Reza Brojerdi) discover they are marked for death via a screenplay written by a dentist that captures everything they will say and do. The lives of these and other disparate characters intersect in a non-linear narrative that opens with an argument about shit kebab shop food (“diarrhoea sauce!”) and brings its various story strands together via engagingly titled chapters like “The Pig and the Chicken” and “The Hunters and the Shit-Bot”. A blackly comic, anarchic portrait of a modern city in the grip of economical / societal collapse, its influences range from Tarantino’s hit man small talk to Sergio Leone’s operatically scored showdowns. The unpredictable story also integrates Nazis, superheroes, a pair of Polish serial killers in animal masks and an old man who believes himself to be God. The central gimmick takes meta cues from WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE, as the protagonists find themselves at the mercy of a script (and fate) that has already been written, while highlighting hokey dialogue and plot contrivances as they happen. Remarkably, the tonal balance works throughout, veering from flippant and bloody to genuinely thoughtful, even poignant – with a consistent streak of wit including a random lesson in spontaneous one liners for our unlikely heroes: “There is a gang bang party in Hell, and your ass is the main entrance…”
Review by Steven West