Film – “The forest in me”: the cakes so close

Much of “The Forest in me”, the second long feature film by the German director Sebastian Fritzsch, is puzzling, which is obviously a very desired effect. In itself, suspense and impenetrability are not yet problematic. But in this case, too much of the metaphorical crypticism falls by the wayside, which could captivate the viewers of a film.

This is quite unfortunate, because the two main, Leonard Scheicher, who, as a protagonist Jan, plays a cranky and strong psychosis young biology student, as well as Lia von Blarer as Jan’s girlfriend Alice, give the figures drawn by the script to pale and unprecise at least something like character, and the two work as a strange “animal” couple.

First of all, we see how you get to know each other in a seminar where mice have to be dissected, which Jan already presents before the first problems, because he does not bring it to the heart of “doing something to his” mouse. Although Alice supports him here for the first time, one of the animals ends up in his coat pocket and finally on the fallow in front of the university building, where Jan secretly exposes it. “It has not seen green for a hundred generations,” commented Alice, who secretly followed him, this rescue mission. Jan replies that now the mouse is free.

The lecture by a pharmaceutical lobbyist will soon be a disturbance by activists on stage. Jan supports the two – one of them is Alice – and he is arrested for a short time. Later they meet in Alice’s apartment. She shows Jan “a little overgrown room” in which she cultivates exotic plants. The suggested natural affine soul mate of the two is also an important motivation in the further course of the love relationship. The initiative is almost exclusively with Alice; Jan is passive, busy with himself. It remains unclear what Alice actually finds about him.

Alice looks like a secondary figure. We learn little about you, neither your own crankiness nor your political activism or her alleged political radicalism are developed or explained narratively. We only see too often that she does something, rarely once, why. The fact that she is a radical left should make it sexy, as a figure, obviously more interesting, to a certain extent. Ultimately, it becomes clear that Jan cannot use her love and affection as a path to liberation.

But it is about liberation in “The Forest in me”, the redemption of the animals from human captivity is a central metaphor. Later in the film, Jan frees other animals, while he himself holds snakes and stabilizer in a terrarium in his apartment. In such ambivalences, however, the strengths of the film lie: as little Jan can really free users and pets, so little his own liberation succeeds.

So we primarily watch a psychotic young man fighting his illness. However, the struggle does not lead him from the dark forest into human society, rather it feels attracted to the wilderness and darkness that prevails metaphorically in itself. Jan wants to become an animal himself to be free. When he finally imitates the movements and noises of a eagle owl on a tree, Alice is enough, and she knows not to help herself more than to let Jan instruct them into the closed.

Jan is shy and apparently lonely, a loner. We also do not learn much about the causes of his problems than that he has delusions and hallucinations that hardly make an unencumbered social life of everyday life possible – only in the vicinity of animals and nature the voices in his head.

In this case, the narrative strategy of revealing little about the background of the two characters to let them speak little and instead to present their actions that the recipient turns into a rhyme on the hustle and bustle of the figures is not open. Because what we see often does not allow a successful rhyme, and the longer the film takes, the more strenuous the exercise becomes somehow smart.

Giving the audience space for speculation and interpretation is naturally part of art production. In order for this interaction to work, the recipient requires sufficient indications to constitute meaning. The problem of “the forest in me” is that so much is left in the vague and unclear that as a viewer you are faced with a difficult to solve.

“The forest in me”: Germany 2024. Director: Sebastian Fritzsch. Book: Marcus Seibert. With Leonard Scheicher and Lia from Blarer. 91 min. Start: 10.4.