Iona Firouzabadi
posted 23 November 2006

Anneliese Michel died at the age of 23 - she is buried in a cemetery in Klingenberg am Main, Bavaria. Her grave is a site of pilgrimage. This is because, in 1976, the Catholic Church sanctioned her exorcism in the belief that she was possessed by six demons. In 2005 the grisly and tragic tale of her life was transposed to a Hollywood script and turned it into a big-budget horror: The Exorcism of Emily Rose. This winter a smaller film out of Germany tells her story again.

Bernd Lange's screenplay renames Anneliese 'Michaela Klinger' - a composite of her surname and her burial place. She is identifiable, but not the same person. This is a film that is careful to draw its boundaries. It is based on real events, but its characters and its details are fictionalised. Its subtlety makes Emily Rose look in appallingly bad taste. Thankfully Requiem is also a far superior film, with a grasp of character, structure and narrative development that its American predecessor lacked.

Michaela is a young woman with strict and old-fashioned parents, growing up in a provincial town. We meet her on the day she's accepted to university. This is a film about youth and the journey from childhood to adulthood, as much as it is about mental collapse and the opacity of doctrinal belief. Her parents are protective and stubborn - Michaela has been ill for some time and although medicated for epilepsy it is clear that this is an incomplete diagnosis. Director Hans-Christian Schmid draws out the distinction between Michaela's mother and her father almost imperceptibly. At first they appear as a unit, but Michaela's father is warm and sympathetic to his daughter's desire for independence, where her mother's presence is cold and unforgiving.

In life, Anneliese Michel's parents were convicted of manslaughter following their daughter's death. Requiem does not fall into an easy portrayal of them as backwoods religious fanatics, sacrificing their child on the altar of their faith. Michaela refuses to heed medical reports or to visit a psychiatrist, preferring to see her condition in terms of her archaic and self-destructive belief in possession. She is as culpable of her downfall as are her parents and her priests. This is a film that is emotional without making concessions to sentiment.

The evocation of 1970s student life at Tübingen University is superb. Michaela is baptised into it by skinny-dipping in a river. She finds a best friend, a boyfriend and lets her hair down - getting it cut into a fashionable bob. Her life at university provides the perfect counterpoint to the darkness that overcomes her. At university she breaks out of her cocoon and dances. Sandra Huller's performance is remarkable for its emotional intelligence and its physicality, especially in the two sequences of Michaela dancing. The first is a joyful liberation, the second a spasm of mental unrest. Requiem can open out the peculiar, poignant beauty in simple, small things. It can then also find the terror in them.