Past Misdeeds: Masks (2011)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Young would-be actress Stella (Susen Ermich) seems to have gotten as far as natural talent and looks can bring her in her dreamt-of career, which is to say, not very far. So when she is pointed in the direction of the Matteusz Gdula School for Acting, she decides to give it a try.

What Stella doesn't know about the school and its now-dead founder is that Gdula's very own acting Method led to a number of violent deaths in the 70s. Officially, the school doesn't teach Gdula's Method anymore, and is now only the usual shark tank of bitchy young actors and actresses.

However, something weird is going on in the school's supposedly closed-down annex, the place where Gdula once held his cultish acting classes. Stella's classmate Cecile (Julita Witt), to whom she finds herself drawn, likes to hint at private lessons taking place in the annex, lessons still following Gdula's esoteric Method. These lessons leave Cecile a much better actress but also with traces of bodily and mental abuse, until she one day just disappears.

Afterwards, Stella is invited to take Cecile's place and be taught Gdula's Method. All she needs to do is take the risk and let herself be isolated in the annex for weeks at a time. Madness and violence, but perhaps also the truth about what happened to Cecile, await her.

I wasn't much of a fan of Andreas Marschall's Tears of Kali but had quite a bit of hope for his future projects, because most of what I disliked about that movie had to do with elements caused by the problems of seat-of-your-pants filmmaking rather than lack of talent in the people involved. As far as I've read, Masks budgetary situation wasn't all that much better (making genre films in Germany is difficult, and making a horror movie that isn't exclusively a gore fest even more so, it seems), but this time around, the result of Marschall's struggles turned out to be much more convincing.

Masks is a film aesthetically highly indebted to 70s giallos, particularly Dario Argento's Suspiria, using cheaper modern digital technology to create a similar look and feel of photography, as well as sharing concepts of narrative structure, and music highly reminiscent of that era.In fact, at times Masks' ability to emulate the look and feel of a 70s giallo becomes downright creepy.

There is, of course, always a risk turning your movie into a pure retro effort when you keep as close to the style of a different era as Masks does. Certainly, the film at hand doesn't do itself much of a service by having a first act with a structure, down to the composition of some scenes, just too identical to that of Suspiria. However, the longer Marschall's film goes on, the more it becomes one of these films that use the style of an earlier era in a way belonging very much to themselves and the era they were made in - an approach comparable to Beyond the Black Rainbow and Berberian Sound Studio, though not quite on the same level as those films.

Like Argento's best, Masks is a film saying all it has to say via its visual aesthetics - subtext (in this case circling the way early abuse of young girls can put them on the road of helping self-perpetuate that abuse, the dangers of looking too deeply into oneself, and the way older men might prey on younger women's weaknesses), narrative, and plot all are part of the film's visible surfaces. They are not so much subservient to the film's looks as so deeply entwined with them it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to see any element here standing separate from the next. It's a rather wonderful example of what we could dub "style as substance" filmmaking.

The solution to Masks' plot is one that might look rather silly on paper, and which in practice has little to do with the way the real world works but it is also one that befits the fever dream/fairy-tale/weird psychology mood of the film. It certainly makes complete sense as part of Stella's character arc, as well as the rules the film has established about itself. This insistence on following an internal logic that treats the movie as a world of its own with rules of its own that may or may not have anything in common with logic as we generally understand it rather than as a surface reproduction of the world we live in, is of course exactly the thing that drives a certain type of viewer away from the giallo and assorted, predominantly European - though some local horror movies from the US certainly share the concept - film genres. This (ill)logic of symbols and the unreal is, of course, exactly what draws me to the genre and films like Masks standing in this different tradition of what a horror film is supposed to be and do, or rather, of what a horror film can be and do apart from showing us interesting ways for young attractive people to die in. Not that Masks, or other films of its type, have anything against being creative in the latter regard, of course; killing off young characters for fun and aesthetic profit is part of their style too, and Masks has its own share of aestheticized carnage to present.

It is very impressive how consequently Marschall is able to keep the mood of Masks so continuously strange, with only a handful of moments where the film's state as a self-contained world breaks down a little. From time to time, one actor in a minor role (the main cast is very impressive for a group of actors with mostly only single credit in their filmographies) isn't quite good enough to keep the mood up, the soundtrack by Sebastian Levermann and Nils Weise sounds a bit too much like Goblin, or the fake 70s hair in the documentary about Gdula's class of 1973 looks only like fake movie hair, but for the most part, there are no seams showing in Masks at all.

This leaves Masks as a wonderful example of its style, as well as one of the handful of German horror films made in the last decades that actually give me hope for genre films coming from my native country.