Nachtschatten (1972)

Businessman Jan (John van Dreelen) stumbles upon a lonely house belonging to a village in the Lüneburger Heide (heath/moorland in Germany’s Lower Saxony). He feels drawn to the woman living there, Elena Berg (Elke Haltaufderheide), for she’s mysterious, seems in turn vaguely seductive and vaguely defensive, and speaks mostly in vague sentences while using the long, empty stares with lack of eye contact beloved of German filmmaking. A habit Jan shares, incidentally.

Elena wants to sell her house, apparently, and Jan might be interested in buying it, but once it comes to inquiries about concrete details like a price, vagueness sets in again. Jan is also interested in getting into Elena’s pants in the dubious ways beloved of 70s toxic masculinity. She keeps rebuffing him, but she also appears to want him to stay with her for as long as possible and makes many an oblique remark about her brother (wherever he is), death, and love.

Niklaus Schilling’s Nachtschatten – which translates so nicely to “Nightshade” it even keeps its ambiguity - is one among the very manageable number of German sort of arthouse horror movies. Neither the Autorenfilm (West Germany’s version of arthouse) nor the country’s movies made for an actual audience were very keen on delving into Germany’s deep well of the fantastical, so there’s no coherent tradition of this kind of filmmaking here post World War II, and thus the few films of the kind that were somehow made all feel somewhat disconnected from each other.

By virtue of the leaden pacing and disconnected acting style dominating the Autorenfilm, and in something of an ironic twist, Nachtschatten feels related to the kind of film Jess Franco or Jean Rollin were making, though without these directors’ sense of personal obsessions, and only a very mild kind of eroticism instead of full-on obsessive kink. It does manage to feel languid rather than stodgy for most of its running time, though, and from time to time, its slowness and unwillingness to say anything directly if it can instead have a character stare into empty air for a bit takes on a quality of poetic, dreamy unreality I’m unsure Schilling was actually going for.

Visually, this is a curious mix of the Gothically coded – the Heide is about as gothic as my part of Germany gets – and drab 70s interiors shot as if the director were willing them into becoming something more fantastical, dream sequences and characters that go through their daily life as if they were dreams – until it becomes some stiff German art business for a couple of scenes again.

It’s certainly an interesting effort, at least halfway towards becoming something special.