Shocking and expressive film, which is a puzzle, formed finally with the final frame. A film that amazes the imagination and dissolves it in the atmosphere of another being.
All family members are sick. Communication occurs with the help of gestures, facial expressions and screams - here the first symptom is visible - a violation of speech. Then a tendency to aggressive behavior (attempts to strangle, slap), hallucinations (periodically appearing throughout the film and creating an unthinkable avant-garde), perception disorders (the hero takes a fake hand by the hand of the girl he likes and caresses her), apparent openness of thoughts (memories of the hero, which he sees as a movie in a cinema where other people sit), thinking disorders (a scene with a bicycle entering the river or the unconscious murder of his mother). Other pieces include this puzzle: a portrait of Eugen Breiler in a mental hospital, a doctor who studied schizophrenia and first used the term, and other surrounding objects, including glasses with lenses that make the eyes eerily large, as another hint of distorted perception of the environment.
The screen presents the world from the point of view of the affected mind, reality through the eyes of a schizophrenic. This is not just impressive, it forces you to forcibly see reality from a different angle under the pressure of hallucinations, which leads to wild discomfort and allows you to feel schizoid disorders.
Recreation of consciousness of the schizophrenic Stelling creates, referring to the distorted perception of objects, objects of the environment, building a mosaic of a reduced mind. Here you can see the allusion to the “cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, there a similar effect is created due to the scenery. The film itself is saturated with allusions: here and Carroll with his mad garden, and “flying over the cuckoo’s nest” when touching on the topic of lobotomy.
Here, at the same time ironically and sadly, the author turns to religion - the family prays at the table, but they are prevented by constantly buzzing flies, which are apparently invisible there, and the prayer ends with catching flies, quite aggressively. Another point: the hero is on the bus and drives past the scene of the accident, where two cars collided, corpses are visible, and in the background there is a billboard with the words “God is...” and the last word has not yet been written.
The film, which covers a lot in a short time period, is both riddles and the unfolded answer to it, which seems to be a meaningless set of bright scenes, but retains the integrity and organicity of the storylines, the brain revolution - that is what Stelling's "Illusionist" is.