Nekromantik

Nekromantik
Director: Jörg Buttgereit
Germany, 1987

PLOT

Rob and Betty are a couple with an unusual passion for offal and human parts. Rob, working in a first aid team, one day during a work operation finds a decomposing body, steals it, and brings it home. There, a mad love affair begins, leading to perverse and sick sexual relations.

CONSIDERATIONS

It is reductive to consider this short film (only 70 minutes long) as just a cult piece of extreme cinema. Buttgereit, after endlessly absorbing the wonderful *Buio Omega*, crafts a unique film, a twisted declaration of love—love that is also death. Necrophilia, madness, homicidal fury, and perversion permeate *Nekromantik* with an almost mythological aura. We’re talking about a film made 45 years ago when censorship would destroy films deemed too extreme, but Buttgereit, working alone, without any funding, and with non-professional actors, managed to bring this rotten and definitely avant-garde work beyond the boundaries of the underground and national cinema.
No one had dared to go this far. At times unbearable and illogical, Nekromantik also has the merit of touching unique emotional chords, enhanced by the peculiar soundtrack made of minimalist piano sounds, heightening the emotional intensity during key moments.

A grotesque film filled with borderline situations of extreme sexual relations, constant discomfort, and a decaying atmosphere, guts and bloody remains, baths with corpses, severed heads, splatter, and endless unease. Yet it remains a significant piece of extreme cinema, a title still relevant today and which even received a sequel (unique but not as impactful).

You can find the film, in its original language, for free on YouTube.

PANDEMONIC MOMENT

The entire movie is a sequence of atrocities and disgusting moments where keeping your eyes on the screen becomes unbearable. Without giving too many spoilers, I’ll mention the scene where Rob takes a bath with a dead cat on his head. It’s revolting when he reaches for the rotten innards and spreads them over his body.

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