Steppenwolf

This cynically cruel update of John Ford’s classic western The Searchers exposes viewers to a nihilistic world in which the only certainty is death, so the only people who will not become helpless victims are those who are devoted to it and seek it out. The final driving force of the apocalyptically degraded society remains the cycle of violence taken to such an extreme that the people resort to absurdity and monstrousness of Boschian proportions, though spatially spread out over bleak steppes, but paradoxically all the more concentrated in the details. No, this isn’t a Tarantino or Mad Max movie, because there isn’t anything cool or exaggerated here; it’s just desperately cynical, hopeless, grotesquely deviant and depressing. The violence isn’t given any aesthetic value, as it comes terrifyingly suddenly and laconically, going beyond the concepts of misogyny to a dimension of pure ruthlessness towards everyone and always bears down on both the victims and the perpetrators, even though the latter are not aware of it at any given moment. Despite all of that, however, Steppenwolf is a tremendously captivating work. Brutal instinctiveness meets iconographic symbolism in the refined shots, which combine the spectacular standard of modern western genre movies with the aesthetic tradition of the intellectual cinema of the former Eastern Bloc. Despite the details, this is not a midnight romp for an intoxicated audience, but a dramatic vision that cheap trash flicks and calculated exploitation movies can’t hold a candle to. (07/03/2024)