FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Ulrich Seidl - Hundstage 

 "Of all things, man is inhuman." (Thomas Bernhard). Anna is a very unpleasant hitchhiker. She lectures about her personal top 10 pets, most erotic TV presenters (...), rummages through handbags, inquires about sexual habits and after ten minutes she is back at the roadside. Around Anna a sterile landscape with supermarkets and parking lots. Change of scene. In a licked row house, a divorced couple with a dead child stalk each other. They provoke each other, hurt each other, tear each other apart. Enter Erwin, who weighs every can of dog food and, if necessary, complains at the supermarket. For those who haven't noticed, we're already immersed in the depraved world of Ulrich Seidl. Seidl, a native of Vienna, may be considered the inventor of Austrian cinema of impositions (influenced, of course, by literary figures like Thomas Bernhard and painters like Manfred Deix). Therefore, Seidl introduces us to withered flesh, sweating bodies, subtle cruelty and escalating violence. His protagonists are lonely and speechless. They act cruelly and violently. Often they are played by amateurs who just don't want to be noticed as actors. This does not fit with the documentary style, which exposes everything so ruthlessly. The evil in Seidl's world is quite banal. It lives right next door and is omnipresent. Its sources are isolation and fear. Seidl's characters always strive for redemption, but that - we may assume - seems completely hopeless. It is much more likely that one of Anna's top 10 diseases will strike you: 1. allergies, 2. migraine, 3. gastritis, 4. polyathritis, 5. diabetes, 6. asthma, 7. cancer, 8. heart attack, 9. cirrhosis of the liver, 10. stroke. And if you watch more Seidl films, you'll notice that his worldview gets more and more negative with each passing year....