Storm

Storm

105 Minutes

Storm is as featureless as they come – an empty-headed, lifeless thriller – the kind of movie that assumes the sight of tears or yelling will in and of itself generate pathos in its audience, the kind that’s forcibly, shakily shot in that antiseptic, bluish-white hue that’s unimaginatively used to signify reality, the kind that carelessly plumbs the histories of actual human atrocities for an unearned sense of weightiness and prestige. It’s ugly, stupid and shitty.

Kerry Fox plays Hannah, an international war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, assigned last minute to a case against an alleged war criminal and Serbian national hero, now living a peaceful, undeserved life in Germany. A good deal of the movie involves her trying to convince Mira (Anamaria Marinca), a woman whose experiences could easily convict the accused, to testify despite her emigration and disavowal of her past. A series of overwrought “this isn’t my fight,” vs. “but what about justice?” scenes ensue, until the story hits enough of an anti-climax that she changes her mind – her life is threatened by a crony to get her to not speak. Now she’s got that justice in her heart!

Part of the ugliness of dealing with this kind of material is that you read a dismissal like that that in the abstract form and I come off as the callous one, but the important thing to remember is that this movie is doling out palatable misery in a by-the-numbers thriller format, perversely skirting the edges of actual atrocities just enough to hide the fact that if you removed its sheen of self-importance you’d be left with nothing but a boring, and surprisingly uneventful, fairly generically structured thriller. We’ve seen this before. In its particular case, Storm also feels exploitative because of its reductive approach to the material. For a film that mines the actual pains of actual people, it’s remarkably non-specific. This lack of specificity could of course be attributed to the filmmakers’ desire to set aside pedantry for emotional truth, but the problem is that Schmid is not Claire Denis, and there is no emotional truth.

There’s something really lifeless about this movie; it almost feels like you’re watching it watching it. At its best I think it could be a good meditative experience – I found myself succeeding at making time have no meaning as it was playing. Was the acting any good? Who knows in the context of something like this? Is it meant to be a performance driven film? Every line delivered in it feels like a really awful line, stiff and stuck in place. Why is it handheld? It’s not accommodating any performances, there’s very little movement in the film; the frames are largely static, though wobbly, and the characters are often seated. If it weren’t for the subtitles I’d tell you to turn the sound off and see if you could follow the story, then we’d laugh. Of course, when there are visual moments, they’re brutally obvious and heavy-handed. Mira, stressed about her safety and her past, smashes her son’s video game when she sees that it’s about war. You might as well just put a bunch of objects on a table and start naming them.

by Andrei Alupului