A depressed musician has a chance encounter with a man claiming to be Death, sending the two on a wild journey through the night in Xavier Böhm’s German directorial debut “O Beautiful Night,” which just premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. Playing out as a twisted updating of “After Hours,” filtered through a neon aesthetic that recalls, if anything, Gasper Noe’s “Enter the Void” (minus the heavy psychedelic interludes), Bohm’s film is a slight addition to the sub-genre of all-night films, grounding the possibility of a supernatural run-in with “Death” and transforming it into something akin to a buddy film.
‘The Plagiarists’ Transforms DIY Mumblecore Filmmaking Into A Self-Indulgent Mess [Berlin Review]
Beginning with a dream of a raven tearing him apart, Juri (Noah Saavedra) is a 20-something wayward musician, who sees his own death everywhere he turns. A real-life encounter with a raven sends him into a seedy casino, where a man claiming to be “Death” (Marko Mandić) promises him a wild night before taking his life. As they move through drug deals, games of Russian roulette and, finally, a strange trip through the local zoo, Juri meets and falls in love with Nina (Vanessa Loibl), a peep show worker, who joins them. As the dawn approaches, Juri and Nina’s blossoming relationship comes against Death’s mandate to take a life.
READ MORE: Casey Affleck’s Hot-Take-Generator ‘Light Of My Life’ [Berlin Review]
If the set up of “O Beautiful Night” sounds anything like promising a climactic battle between love and death, Böhm is much more interested in exploring the ways in which these three characters interact, grounding what could be a heavily supernatural film in the blossoming relationships of these three characters. Yet their interactions are more banal than illustrative, as neither “Death,” Juri nor Nina are fully developed. Juri’s constant passivity leads him down a number of questionable paths, as he continually follows “Death” from one bad place to another. One of the central mysteries, in fact, is if “Death” is really who he claims to be or, perhaps, just a junkie who knows the wrong people.
When Nina joins the guys’ night, she immediately becomes a possible love interest, and thus savior, for Juri. Her character is both thinly developed and, frankly, a cliche. The stripper, with a fondness for reading Nietzsche, who is the key to our protagonist’s redemption feels outdated. Juri, on the other hand, is too passive as a protagonist, as we never really get to know him as a character, outside of his interactions with “Death.”
Nina’s presence is symptomatic of problems that exist in the entire film, which favors oddly disconnected scenes that never truly gel together, leading to a take-it-or-leave-it approach. The journey often has a meandering quality to it, with the hint of menace to come. Often, though, the film feels weird for the sake of being weird, never grounding its strange, isolated moments in any type of character development. An exceedingly tense Russian roulette scene staged at a go-kart track gives way to a number of repetitive drug-fueled bar segments that do little to clarify the characters.
Not giving anything away, the ending appears to be a bit too neatly packaged. If the build-up doesn’t exactly clarify with the conclusion, Böhm’s directorial debut does contain a number of weird and interesting scenes making it, nonetheless, a strange trip into the Berlin underworld. [B-]
