196 words about Der Todesking

Beyond canonical filth

You watch enough transgressive/disturbing/BANNED! movies and you forget they’re supposed to horrify you. The nauseating sheen fades. All the decadent sex-and-death Sadeian poetics — very literary, high-minded stuff — bounce right off. Jörg Buttgereit’s Der Todesking is a sodden, grimy litany of suicide in seven parts. People are having visions of a rotting corpse putrefying in excruciating, maggoty detail. It’s the single-minded accumulation of all this that got to me. A serene survey of a bucolic bridge with the names and ages of various people listed onscreen. Connect the dots. The camera sprints toward the edge, rockets across the abyss, shuddering, threatening to drop at any moment. A woman in a red sundress reads a manifesto; cut to her strapping a Steadicam rig to her chest. Two pistols in the belt; crowded venue. The gun in her hand hovers in first person. Buttgereit’s Nekromantik is canonical filth, but not even the Unearthed Films copycats have touched this one, which ends with a guy having an uncomfortably real breakdown and bashing his head into the wall until he crumples, dead. A stick-figure skeleton with a crown on a kid’s sketchpad: “He makes people not want to live anymore.”