Die Ausgesperrten

The film adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel shows the deed, the slaughter of one's own family, like the release of a great overpressure. On the one hand, the high school graduate Peter can no longer bear the whole petty bourgeois fug, the National Socialist past of his father, an authoritarian failure, the perverse double standards of his beloved mother; on the other hand, Peter Witkowski can no longer bear his own dilettantism, his pseudo-intellectual phrases, his arrogant behaviour as a self-appointed gang leader. He, too, is a failure, a braggart in a black existentialist guise. With an ice-cold gaze and unsparing irony, Novotny dissects a society in whose innermost recesses the seeds of National Socialism continue to thrive undaunted. (Christoph Fuchs/red)