Remember a great nerdy Tom Schilling roaming the streets of Berlin in last year's hit movie "Oh Boy"? In "Who am I", a great nerdy Schilling roams through
Berlin on Ritalin.
The film has been pitched as a "hacker drama", with a colourful foursome of popular German actors -not including Jackie Chan, that's "Who Am I?"--
hacking for the greater good (aka social engineering IRL). And for fun. Until someone makes a mistake.
Funny it is --when you experience writer-director Baran bo Odar (previously of "The Silence") live, you see it comes naturally to him-- and sometimes it veers into the silly (see poster). But I think the creators know it and are toying with it (and us). As bo Odar says after the TIFF world premiere: "It's like your child, you can't change it."
The visual realization in a parallel "dark net" universe keeps it fresh as does the funky electronica score. And just when you think this is a usual suspect (comfortingly, both Russians and Americans are still the bad guys), the director pulls some nice trickery out of his hat.
The director admits to bring a fraud, like one if his characters, when it comes to the tech world in his film, claiming to have known next to nothing about hacking before starting research for the film. It doesn't show. As a digital media professor points out to me afterwards, every Ethernet cable is in the right spot, a rare occurrence in movies that are all about zipping bits and bytes from wall to wall.
Digging a bit deeper, the film deals with
identity questions (see the title), pitching being invisible (not all bad) against being somebody. Or being more than somebody. I will argue that one of the four main players is not ideally cast and/or under-developed as a character, but I'll let that slide.
Looks like a New little Wave is coming out of Germany (see my Berlinale review of "Stereo"): the well-made thriller. He won't quite win Best Script or Character Development here, but I'll be curious to see how the busy bo Odar's next projects --an international thriller, an action comedy and a dark crime TV mini series-- turn out (as Variety suggested when they put him on their
10 Directors to Watchlist in 2011).
Fast furious fun, and Toronto audiences Loved it with a capital L, the right fare for a Saturday night. I think it's safe to say the American Market will too (It certainly is better than the TIFF13 opener "The Fourth Estate" on Julian Assange that didn't make it across its own high-set bar).
Gotta go now & change all my passwords.
by
Jutta Brendemühl
P.S. Thank you to the lady who congratulated me on my great acting (flatteringly mistaking me for the beautiful and talented Danish actress Trine Dyrholm).
