Angst screens as part of WatchAUT, 15 Mar 2025
Gerald Kargl’s Angst opens with a tracking shot of its male protagonist as he walks down an otherwise empty suburban street. Courtesy of cinematogropher Zbigniew Rybczyński (who is also the film’s co-writer and editor), this is a single fluid shot, in what looks like Steadicam, following and circling its subject so tightly that at times it resembles SnorriCam. The effect is jarring, bringing us all at once into close proximity with a figure who is also estranged by the camerawork, so that even if we could not see the gun in the man’s hand, we would still, merely from the unnatural movement of the framing alone, feel alienated and uneasy. We suspect, right from the start, that there is something alarmingly wrong with and about this man – and that suspicion is quickly confirmed when, having failed to get past one house’s front gate, he moves to another, knocks on the front door, and when a late-middle-aged woman opens, he announces, “I’m shooting now”, and fires at close range, killing her before leaving the scene.
“I had no plan and no motive,” the man has stated of the crime, in a letter, shown on screen in a handwritten scrawl, to a psychiatrist during the subsequent trial, “I only had the feeling, something has to happen.” This forms part of a montage of images, footage and police evidence, accompanied by the voice of an unseen, authoritative narrator (Robert Hunger-Bühler) who lays out the details of the man’s arrest, his trial and imprisonment, his damaged childhood and his long criminal history. This is the instantly recognisable format of a true-crime documentary – and although this film ‘based on true events’ never names the man at its centre, he is closely modelled on the real-life multiple murderer Werner Kniesek.
Yet where the organised structure and collated materials of a documentary are designed to impose order and rationality on something that might otherwise be disordered and defy all reason, the rest of the film, catching up with the man a decade later on the day of his release from prison, plays like a parody of that earlier documentary section. For once out, although the man is eerily taciturn and is heard briefly speaking to others only three times in the film, his voice pervades the film’s soundtrack, replacing that of the narrator, its calm tones in extreme contrast with the frenzied action we witness unfolding on screen. For he is immediately driven back to his old ways, first contemplating the murder of two young women in a café (Claudia Schinko, Beate Jurkowitsch), then of a taxi driver (Renate Kastelik) who gives him a lift, before finally breaking into the isolated home of an elderly mother (Edith Rosset, voiced by Josefine Lakatha), her daughter Sylvia (Sylvia Ryder, voiced by Karin Springer) and disabled son (Rudolf Götz), all of whom he uses to execute his sadistic urges.
Everything in Angst is unsettling and off-skew, from the canted camera angles and queasily immersive tracking shots to the intrusive soundscape of overamped water drips, foot falls and phone rings, to Klaus Schulze’s electronic score. Then there is the man himself, brilliantly embodied by the actor Erwin Leder, who in his obvious agitation, in his silence, in his odd, angular gait and jerky movements, even in the way that he devours a sausage, is an alienation effect unto himself, constantly resisting the viewer’s desire to find common ground. It is almost as though the film is no better than prison at containing and taming this inexplicable force of nature – and the closer that Kargl brings us to his protagonist’s unhinged worldview, the more he repels us from our very act of viewing, and alienates us from ourselves. For the figure with whom we are repeatedly invited to identify is always centre-screen in front of us, yet entirely beyond our comprehension or conscience. He is palpably human, yet at the same time insistently other, and the void that he presents to us is not readily filled with our own attitudes and feelings.
Kargl’s unflinching study in psychopathy focuses on a man who is pure impulse, appetite and id (“I just had to do it, I couldn’t explain it”, he says of his actions). He claims to have “a concrete plan, the details were all fixed”, but in fact his outrage is all improvised chaos, orchestrated to the tune of his immediate, shifting fantasies, and checked only by his desire – frequently forgotten – not to be caught. Like the man’s victims, we are ato once horrified and confused by what we see. “I was in a state of mind that excluded every kind of logic,” the man will say in voiceover, “I was afraid of myself”. Angst keeps bidding the viewer to share that state of mind, as it deploys the tense tropes of home invasion to inflitrate our consciousness and get into our head.
Far from in any way glamourising the man’s atrocities, it forces us to get right up close to their grim, grubby reality, while constantly hearing his own unbalanced commentary on them. This is the grim template not only for, say, John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1985), Antonio Campos’ Afterschool (2008) and Simon Killer (2012), and Chris Nash’s In A Violent Nature (2024) which all offer blank-eyed views of killer compulsion, but also of course for the works of Kargl’s Austrian compatriot Michael Haneke, especially Benny’s Video (1992) and Funny Games (1997/2007), whose clinical perspectives on voyeurism and murder similarly reflect the alienation of our age. For whatever there is in the protagonist of Angst that we also recognise in ourselves represents a more monstrous aspect of humanity that we might prefer not to see at all. Meanwhile, this man’s imperative to pursue his aberrant urges and to get off on the suffering of others does not end with his arrest and imprisonment, or indeed with him. “It will happen again,” he says chillingly in voiceover, “It has to.”
strap: Gerald Kargl’s reeling, unruly, utterly alienating study in psychopathy shifts from true-crime documentary to showing a serial killer’s rampage up close
© Anton Bitel
