The only character I actually liked in this movie is a dog, who meets an unfortunate demise which is mostly off camera and, I guess, "relevant to the plot," but it does sour my memory of this brooding Teutonic mood piece. A sallow little punk named Anton has apparently largely withdrawn from the world since he found his suicidal father's body in the tub a while back---or that's what he says happened; one of the messages in "What You Don't See" seems to be "If you don't see it, don't take it for granted--or even if you do see it." His mother and her current squeeze have dragged Anton off to the remote northwestern French coast for a vacation, where our lonely lad meets a neighboring duo of similar age who may or may not be brother and sister, and whose own father may or may not be dead, and who may or may not even exist themselves. (Whenever there's a character who's only ever seen by one other character. a warning bell should go off...) Over the week of the vacation (although it seems to last longer) Anton participates in various youthful hijinks with the uninhibited pair and becomes less inhibited himself, becoming downright uppity with his mother and prospective stepfather. Eventually some bad things happen (which the local cops basically blow off, since that's their function as movie hick cops) and Anton and now just his mother head back home, where presumably he'll eventually become the next famous-for-fifteen minutes German mass murderer, like that pilot who flew the plane into the French Alps. What "What..." chiefly has going for it is director Wolfgang Fischer's ability to make the French coastal area look like a foreign planet, which (along with some nice atmospheric choral music) lets one follow along with the dreamlike ambiance. But in hindsight all I can really focus on is the dying dog. Herr Fischer, in the future please restrict yourself to hominid victims. A note on the English subtitles: When a character occasionally tells another to "Hau ab," which in the German vernacular means "Beat it" or "Get lost," the subtitle renders it as "Piss off," a largely British expression. The other subtitles don't seem particularly directed at a British audience, so it's a little puzzling. The Germans have a lot of words relating to bodily functions such as urination---not surprising, given that they're toilet trained virtually at birth--but "abhauen" isn't one of them....
Review of Was du nicht siehst
