“Incurable” by Renja Schmakeit

“Incurable” by Renja Schmakeit

The light tones, sometimes pale, of the pastel shades typical of a certain northern European cinema, this time seem to mean something more than a simple reference to an aesthetic canon. The lightness of photography, almost as impalpable as a breath, illuminates a hard, simple, predictable but unacceptable and unsettling story. As every time it is the course of existences, from life to death. A linear and tragic and delicate story every time. So it takes on a subliminal and very elegant sense, the formal rigor with which Renja Schmakeit tells us this story of love, loss, ethics and cynicism. In a nutshell: a story of human beings.

The gaze of the talented author is perfectly aligned with the feelings of rigid emotion that are felt while watching. A hardness that shatters, explodes in the chest, just after the finale, when the story takes the inexorable course of all things and the spectator knows he has always known it, but he never wanted to admit it. In this sense, Schmakeit’s delicacy and sensitivity guide emotions, dialogues and images, in a construction of a state of mind rather than a story. Every element, from the script to the acting, works discreetly. The talent in this film is everywhere, but it is expressed on tiptoe. Then the film opens up to a higher dimension than simple cinema and becomes a metaphor for life itself, or at least a valid cathartic experience, with which we can rework our deepest fear and reflect on a social question.