Although this is a very unique movie, the big main lines can be compared to such great achievements like Szlingerbaum's "Bruxelles-Transit" (1980), Goulding's Nightmare Alley (1947) or even Fassbinder's Despair (1978), and in newer time most of all with Moodysson's "Lilja 4-ever" (2002). All the main characters of this movies - Melanie Proeschle, Stan Carlisle, Hermann Hermann and Lilja - share their inability to "read people" and pay it in the end with their sanity and/or life. Their nightmare alley is a one-way street, they may well still realize it, but, as Kafka wrote in "The country physician": once followed the night-bell - and there will be no return. But there is also a leitmotif that all movies in question share; a specific use of light which of first guessing appears to be contradicting and which can best be compared to that light which attracts animals living in dark forests before their get the bullet of their hunters. As can be best seen in "Bruxelles-Transit", such a "Trip into the light", as Fassbinder called this phenomenon, is always characterized by specific transitions rather than to a sudden raping maelstrom. From Stan Carlisle we learn that even in the case we succeed temporarily to turn around on our way to the Exitus (cf. again a word by Kafka), this feeling of having defeated our fate is highly fragile and cheating, the Fatum will overtake us quickly. From Lilja we know the perhaps the most terrible insight is that being prisoners of such transit corridors we may even have to rush in order not to miss our possibility to go out of this life. As "The Forest for the Trees" (2003) concerns, we recognize that all stories have in common a story-line that starts, comes to a climax, and then very rapidly ends in a Accelerando Furioso, without a middle part. The way how the director conceived the end of Melanie Proeschle, this is, to speak the truth, almost beyond imagination.
