7/10
Till Kleinert’s Der Samurai is
not a typical horror film – no more a slasher than a thriller or a Japanese
revenge film (Kill Bill references abound). It’s a beautifully and brutally
orchestrated metaphor about small town mentality and an attempt to escape from
it through anger and violence.
Michel Diercks plays Jakob, a
newbie police officer in a remote German village where everyone knows each
other and abides by the same narrow-minded rules. The suffocating atmosphere
propels Jakob straight towards the woods and wolves which start terrorizing the
village – the same way its inhabitants terrorize Jakob. They constantly sneer
at him, undermining his decisions. His awkwardness and shy demeanor only
accentuate the village’s reaction to someone they perceive as an outsider,
insecure and not manly enough.
Fascinated with the wolves, and
attempting to lure them away from the village with raw meat, Jakob stumbles
across a different kind of manliness in the form of a man in a white, blood splattered
dress.
Jakob receives a long, thin
package with his name crossed out and addressed to a “Lonely Wolf”. Shortly
afterwards, he receives a phone call from the said “Wolf”, reminiscent of the
Mystery Man from Lost Highway, inviting him into his “den” – an isolated
cottage in the woods where Jakob finds him putting on lipstick, ready to go out
“dancing”. The man in the white dress opens the package and takes out a samurai
sword.
From the beginning, Jakob’s
actions have been clumsy: he blindly lets himself be lured to the stranger’s home
forgetting his gun. The lack of a weapon does not stop him from running after
the Samurai when things escalate. The Samurai, however, seems to be his
opposite: once he starts destroying the village and killing the villagers he performs
that which such grace and coordination, leaving Jakob completely unsuited to
deal with the situation.
As much as the Samurai is Jakob’s
opposite, he is also his doppelganger: Mr Hyde to his Dr Jekyll. The package is
addressed to both him and the “Lone Wolf” – in crossing out his name Till
Kleinert hints at a transformation Jakob is about to experience. The same name
is also attributed to him by a woman whose car breaks down and who he tries,
very unsuccessfully, to seduce.
The seduction of violence, on the
other hand, becomes too strong to pass up. In one of the film’s many symbolic
scenes, the Samurai coerces Jakob to desecrate an ornamental pink flamingo,
referencing without a doubt John Waters. The anger and pure energy with which
he destroys this symbol of small-town mentality marks his descent into
darkness.
Darkness is, of course, embodied
in the Samurai: a bit too obvious conjuring of the Freudian animalistic id. As
the night progresses, the demarcation between Jakob and the Samurai gets
increasingly blurry. From fascination he finally moves towards action, as he
recognizes in the Samurai a complete slap in the face, or a sword across the
neck of normative society. The Samurai is an effeminate warrior whose
appearance, sexuality and strength undermine social fabrics of the isolated
German village.
(Spoilers ahead.) A particularly
striking scene is the one in which the two characters dance together in front
of a bonfire, “watched” by the beheaded villagers arranged around them: an
audience of empty cages – or headless dogs to their wolves as the Samurai
describes it at one point. This staged aspect of the film plays well with the
performative sexuality of the main characters. The queer element, however, has
lead to many simplified interpretations of the film that connect femininity
with homosexuality, criticizing Kleinert’s view of the latter as a deviance
that needs to be destroyed before it produces more damage.
Jakob does kill the Samurai in
the end, but not in some sort of a victory against “deviance”. On the contrary,
Till Kleinert has from the start made this utterly clear. Jakob is not killing
a “transvestite”, as the villagers call the Samurai, but an irrational (and
childish) answer to the cage in which the village has imprisoned him. A reaction
to normativity that is simply – too much. And similarly limited as the village.
The moment Jakob sees the head of the woman he wanted to seduce in the bonfire, he starts coming to his senses. Severed head of the
woman he fancied brings him back to humanity and away from darkness. And as the
day finally breaks, he kills the Samurai in a scene that vividly emphasizes the
stranger’s bestial nature. Like a satyr, he meets his death with a full
erection, ejaculating from his neck as Jakob decapitates him.
