In short: Lost Place (2013)

Late teen Daniel (François Goeske), is going geocaching with Elli (Jytte-Merle Böhrnsen), a girl he knows from his favourite geocaching forum with whom he obviously shares a reciprocated crush, his best friend, the rather more outgoing Thomas (Pit Bukowski) and Elli’s best friend, the rather more outgoing Jessica (Josefine Preuß). Both best friends are also there as some kind of moral support rather than because they enjoy geocaching, so you just might see some mild parallels here.

The cache they are looking for is hidden somewhere in the Pfälzerwald (that’s apparently the “Palatine Forest” in English). As it will turn out, it’s hidden in a very unfortunate place, behind a badly locked fence and smack dab in the middle of an old experimental HAARP installation that doesn’t seem to be manned anymore but which is still running well enough, making the treasure hunt rather more adventurous and deadly than anyone would have expected.

So, apparently, Thorsten Klein’s Lost Place is “the first German mystery-thriller shot in 3D and mixed in Dolby Atmos”, which means it looks surprisingly good and is mixed way too loud for my taste. As a small aside, when the German pop cultural mainstream says “mystery”, it usually means horror/SF – often with a certain Fortean bent – in the tradition of the X-Files, thanks to German TV programmers in the 90s learning/imagining that you get more asses in front of the TV when you call horror by a misapplied English term. Which is about as German a thing as you will encounter.

At least, that term in its German meaning fits rather neatly with what’s actually going on in Lost Place which is all about treating electromagnetism and a bit of conspiracy lore in a pretty Fortean manner. For most of its running time, it’s a decently enjoyable film, looking really rather pretty and often managing to use that prettiness to create a pleasantly threatening mood of paranoia. The dialogue’s on the cringey side, it has to be said, and the bigger emotional beats all teeter on the brink of inadvertent comedy – though the young yet experienced cast do their best to sell weird melodrama about pacemakers (don’t ask, and I won’t have to explain) as Very Serious Stuff.


Obviously, the plot itself, with an antagonist that will turn out to be a (non-sentient) electromagnet, is of dubious scientific value and really rather silly, but then, when did I let that stop me from enjoying a movie? Plus, this is a still rare example of a contemporary German genre movie that’s not ashamed to be a bit silly and treat goofy ideas seriously, instead of doing the typical German cinema thing of trying to shove serious themes treated as po-faced as possible in to prove that this is not a mere entertainment (the horror!). And entertaining, as well as well-paced, I found Lost Place to be.