Antibodies : A Messy German Horror

I'm not big on gore as a genre. There I said it. If it's part of the story, then its not much of an issue for me.  I can overlook the brutality. But I think I'm beyond the point where I can watch pure shock factor for the sake of being shocked. In honesty I'm more shocked by a compelling well-written story than by a slow evisceration by a creepy one-eyed hillbilly in a rusty shed.

Luckily, the German thriller Antibodies is a well-written departure from the pointlessly gruesome.  

When a deranged serial killer Gabriel Engel is caught and imprisoned after killing 13 young boys, he again becomes the prime suspect in another gruesome crime in an outlying farm town, where the culprit was never found.


The local police of the farm town send the only law enforcement agent they have, Marten, who is also a farmer, to interrogate Gabriel.  A strange and unpleasant bond is formed when Gabriel refuses to talk to anyone but Marten, and evil and good are pitted against each other for dominance of Marten's mind.

Antibodies steals a bit from Silence of the Lambs, and the iconic thriller Se7en, but even Gabriel quips jokingly, "You were expecting Hanibal Lechter?" And maybe it's just me, but I found Gabriel just as intimidating as Hannibal, if not more so.

Marten's struggles with his own moral dilemmas and his insidious new friend push him down a dark path.  The movie plays well as a thriller and a suspense, and the tension grows throughout, and there are several well developed twists, but the film also lacks any real horrifying edge.  The true fun of the movie is watching Gabriel play games with the helpless Marten, while the mystery unfolds in his small town, where he is charged to find a killer among his neighbors and friends.

A fun mystery, fairly gory and of course, weird in that German sorta way.

MR RATING: 6.0