Weisse Lilien (2007) Reviews

• Overdone, but impressive!

  maros6122010-02-28

  Hanna is an inhabitant of residential area called Neustadt. It consists of a series of apartment modern buildings, the apartments are equipped and/or controlled trough high tech systems. The city has it's own security, police corp, political administrative representation. The plot starts introducing the domestic violence situation Hanna has to put up with. This results in her relocation to higher, 11th floor, full of snobbish, and seriously creepy people. Hannah develops some sorts of relationships with these people, but her real friend is a young woman she got to know on self-defense meetings for women. After relocation to 11th, the movie starts to operate with lots of psychotic features, that do not make much sense in the process of watching, which makes it hard to sit through. If this is psycho-thriller, for the very most part, it's far more psycho than an actual thriller, with, dare I say, very common horror clichés. I personally felt somewhat disappointed. The Neustadt area and premises looked like a perfect scenery, the film from technical aspect had no notable flaws, but after seeing the movie, I felt i didn't use much of its potential. I'm sure though that nature of this film and its execution found its fans. Note : The residential area is real. It's called Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa. It's situated in 23rd district of Vienna, Austria. If you're in Vienna, you can visit it, a subway train will take you there.

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• Acting and atmospheric take make it work

  Horst_In_Translation2017-08-24

  "Weisse Lilien" (means "White Lilies") or "Silent Resident" is co-production between 4 European countries that resulted in the 95-minute live action movie back in 2007. This means it has its 10th anniversary right now and it is one of the more recent efforts by longtime writer and director Christian Frosch. The cast includes at least three names that German film buffs will perhaps recognize, most of all Johanna Wokalek, who is once again a scene stealer. But lead actress Hobmeier as well as supporting actor Wuttke have appeared in several well-known works in the past too. IMDb says that this is mostly a thriller movie and I agree, but I would say that it can also be classified as drama, maybe even SciFi. I believe that the script has occasional weaknesses at times, but I still believe that there is more positive than negative about these 1.5 hours. This has mostly to do with the fact that all the actors in here are really doing a convincing job, so thumbs-up for the casting director(s) as they basically made everything right. And in those situations when the script may keep the cast from shining, at least the atmospheric take is a winner. There is something bleak to the film that works very well together with the concept of characters looking for their very personal definition of happiness. It's not too easy to put it into words. You need to watch it and then you will know what I mean. All in all, this is by no means best-of-the-year material, probably not even just counting the German-speaking countries, but it is an interesting idea and decent execution by everybody working on it for the most part. And if it gets the talented Johanna Wokalek again to step in front of a camera, then I am all for it. Go see this one, I give it a thumbs-up. It's pretty unusual for a German(-language) film, but it's working nicely as a whole.

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