Occasionally malignant and always very original black & white film about the delusion and reality of twelve-year-old Stephanie (an amazing role by Siraya Da Mota). Stephanie has problems – at school and with her parents – that go considerably further than adolescent whimsy. She has very confusing sexual and violent fantasies that increasingly dominate her. She sees herself murder her parents with the gruesome medieval weapon that, with beautiful irony, is known in German as Morgenstern. The boundary between dream and reality starts to disappear slowly. Stephanie dreams in turn that she is a baby (who is kidnapped and killed) or a seductive Lolita (who is raped by the youthful killer Marc). She yearns for suicide and allows herself in her delusion (or is it reality?) to be poisoned by two strange old downstairs neighbours. Film-maker Mathieu Seiler has made a strikingly accurate evocation of the desperate world of feelings of a young girl. He explains it partly through his own age – he was only nineteen when he wrote the script and twenty when he shot the film. He still feels close to the difficult inner world of an adolescent. Reward for his own departure from adolescence for Seiler was that his father worked on the set of the film. Where many contemporary film-makers avoid profound psychology and metaphors, Seiler deliberately chose this risky course, and intelligently too.
