"No evil will come to you..." (Psalm 90) The debut of Catherine Gebbe is based on a real case from the life of German society, when the “evil” family sheltered a “good” boy who was completely ready for sadism from others – that is, did not resist at all. The picture of the German director is not so much a documentary investigation of a crime as an attempt to study the very personality trait that thinkers call “non-resistance to evil by violence.”
Therefore, the real foundation of the film is not savory scenes of bullying, but the sphere of the key character of Tore, ideal in the soul, without which all the psychopathological features of the relationship shown lose their uniqueness. The ideal for the Torah is chosen with true German care. Of course, this is not Tolstoy or Gandhi, suitable for adulthood. The image of the blond naive boy is better combined with the near-Christian youth environment in the face of punks from the German movement Jesus Freaks. There is loud music, and a healthy attitude towards marriage, and the absence of any dogmatism.
Christianity-Lite, which admires the way of life of Jesus, but does not notice the Cross, is short-lived, like the dew of righteousness under the sun of evil. And Tore bitterly watches how a former like-minded person easily breaks those vows that mean more to our hero than ... life.
This absolutization of two or three principles, like the absolutization of sadism in other characters, shows that Nothing Bad Can Happen is not a realistic film, but a metaphysical one. Words and deeds are turned into philosophical acts, and their main feature is so convexly exposed in the heroes that it eclipses everything else.
"Suffering is the main law of being," to paraphrase Prince Myshkin, might have said the Torah. “Bring him to us and we will know him,” says the modern Sodomites. Interestingly, Tore’s behavior is not good at all (he is not able to protect others), but rather a Nietzschean principle of avoiding the concept of evil in general. After seemingly utterly savage and soul-killing abuses, this blonde creature is still fun, like the spirit of freedom in Nietzsche, which “dances in swamps and in sorrow, like in meadows.”
It would seem that everyone remains at his own: Torah with restrained vows, and Sodomites with their power to do evil. And only the growing discontent of the chief trustee Benno shows whose side the victory is on. In order that evil may not conquer you, it must know nothing of its own in you. Victory over evil is victory over evil in itself, says the director, coming to this conclusion in a very specific way.
7 out of 10
Original