Time of Moulting (Fellwechselzeit) - Final Girls Berlin Film Festival

In a rundown house a family of three are playing monopoly, next a cat is thrown at the young girl Stephanie (Zelda Espenschied) who is drawing. Next we are outside the house and Steph is playing with 2 girls new to the area asking if they can enter. The next shot they are gone and so the film moves forward in a series of animated stills. The camera capturing movements within the frame.

Its unsettling to start with but we fall into the routine of the family as mother (Freya Kreutzkam) brushes her daughter’s hair and her father (Bernd Wolf) appears to have scant interest in either. The rubbish meanwhile is piling up around them. Her mother is depressed which is having a clear effect on her daughter who after another exploration of the house finds an old suitcase containing slaughter gear, apron, knives and a stun-gun that makes a good toy. As mother reads Hansel and Gretel, Stephanie gets told for playing with her grandmother’s false teeth, which come in useful later on too.

Moving forward ten years and the house is worse though mother and father have not changed that much. Stephanie (now played by Miriam Schiweck) obviously older physically her mental stature now far more assertive to the point of contempt for her parents. As we pass through Christmas and Easter in the squalid place pressures mount.

A very bleak film from writer and director Sabrina Mertens even ugly in parts. The static camera, 57 frame slide show effect forcing the viewer to square on the actors and their surroundings, to take them in. It should appear very episodic but it isn’t as the actors work and play in their surroundings. With relatively little dialogue Mertens makes clever use of space to develop character and the story as well as give us nuggets into character and relationships as when mother and daughter are playfully bouncing up and down on the bed in the forefront.

So technically it is a calculated film though with a pretty clear narrative flow. From which we pick up that the family is dysfunctional though not totally unloving. Father is totally in the background while mother ages over the years the waste around them too continues to pile up. That and Stephanie are the only things that blatantly change over the years the latter taking on the bolshiness of youth as one would expect though with an added cold malicious streak. Taken with her very dark drawings and her returns to the butcher’s box of implements there’s hints that something or someone went askew. That however is something for the viewer to think about as Mertens doesn’t present any easy answers.