Absolutely Fantastic

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Stylish above and beyond expectation this Polish oddity has no cheap hand held wobble cam to drag it down to the level of average horror fare & yet, average horror fare it ultimately is. French born Cinematographer Piotr Jaxa has a long list of shorts and documentary's on his list of achievements & this one looks as if he were working for the Swiss Tourist Bureau - filled with delightful eye candy views of sweeping Swiss countryside he steals the show completely. Polish director Greg Zglinski is following closely the style his fellow countryman Roman Polanski perfected with 'The Tennant' and several other movies about unhinged characters. With a bizarre script by Jorg Kalt (who curiously took his own life soon after he wrote this) the viewer is taken on a mind-bending trip into spot-the- crazy or did-it-happen? territory. Problem here is that with little or no relief from the mystery it becomes quite tiresome. A lack lustre music score adds almost nothing to the mixed up goings on and only those who enjoy a good looking - but basically going nowhere movie will be left fully awake. For a small select audience only - Oh, some may enjoy the strange looking talking cat that comes and goes to taunt people with some murderous suggestions.

This is easily one of the best German movies you will see this season. It's so tightly plotted that I'm wondering how to praise it without giving away too much. What is the housesitter up to? Who is the mysterious upstairs neighbor? Is Nick cheating on Anna? Or is Anna losing her mind? Greg Zglinski leaves you guessing for a long time. Half-way through the movie, several characters, including a talking cat, start dropping hints that were too blunt for my taste, but that's a minor kink in a very sleek script (based on an unfinished draft by Joerg Kalt). Philip Hochmair and Birgit Minichmayr are fabulous as Nick and Anna. They are both seasoned character actors with years of stage experience, and it shows. The camerawork is superb. The movie's trademark visual is the frame - a window, a doorway, a peephole, an actual picture frame. I took this as the director's way of saying that everything we see is someone's version of what's going on, rather than an objective account. If you liked Existenz, Mulholland Drive, Identity, Shutter Island, or Upstream Color, my guess is you will enjoy Animals as well.

I am a passionate of Switzerland, one of my preferred countries for vacation, a place that won its name for the beauty of its nature, but also for the calm and order that seem to reign in its cities and villages, as well as in the relations between its people. Seldom has the beauty of Switzerland and of its mountains seemed to me so disturbing, so uneasy, as in 'Tiere' the film directed by Greg Zglinski which I have seen a couple of weeks ago at the Haifa International Film Festival. The title was translated in English as 'Animals', but should it rather be 'Beasts'? Better German speakers will tell me, It seems that the director and authors of script learned one of the basic rules of fantastic and horror art, theorized and applied in its writings by the Romanian historian and writer Mircea Eliade: fantastic and horror can be even more efficient when exceptional events and strange phenomenons start in a 'normal' and friendly surrounding. The movie directed by Greg Zglinski turns a land of vacation that is very familiar to many of us into a land of uncertainty and uneasiness.What we are presented in the film is a collection of inter-related parallel stories. At first time they are quite banal - a mid-class German couple leaves for a few months in the Swiss mountains, they do not seem to be the happiest couple in the world, but is not infidelity nowadays quite banal also? They leave a caretaker in place in their apartment, she seems to have her small misdemeanors as well. The neighbor upstairs falls to her death, was it an accident or a crime, did it really happen? Yet, all is more complicated than it seems, we soon slide from Woody Allen into Hitchcock territory, because same as the characters in the story we never know what is true and what is cheat, and the style of filming is so designed that we are never sure what is reality, what is dream, or maybe comma delirium. The director plays with the cinema genres as he does with the perspectives of the story telling. At some moments in time 'Tiere' looks like characters comedy, at other it is mixing elements of social drama and romantic stories, add to this the fantastic touch that envelops everything as the fog sometimes envelops the landscape of the mountains.I liked much of what I have seen. The film benefits of efficient acting with Birgit Minichmayr, Philipp Hochmair, and Mona Petri playing more than three roles, or -if you want - more than three incarnations of their characters. Cinematography is superb. I liked less the ending which commits the sin to try to explain too much. Overall however, 'Tiere' is a film to see, not only by fans of the horror films genre.

I just saw this movie at the Berlinale 2017 and it literally blew my mind. It's been a long time since I saw such a complex and multi-layered story interwoven with strong and beautiful images and sound. The dialogues are crisp but meaningful, the acting of the two main characters highly convincing and beautiful. The story follows a married couple in a crisis. He is having an affair, which leaves her feeling unloved and full of doubts. With a trip to the mountains they want to try to find back their lost link and clear up uncertainties but, when they unexpectedly hit a sheep on the road, things turn into mysterious events which eventually, all are representing parts of perception and reality. Based on the script of passed-away German writer and director Jörg Kalt, Greg Zgilinsky created a masterpiece of visual beauty and intense emotions. His intuitive way to approach the profound script and to bring together all the scenes with an editing that totally makes sense and adds to the material, he found a way to visualize different layers of characters and realities. A must-see on all levels!