No Admission

Loretta Fahrenholz, Two A.M. (2019)
DCP, colour, sound, 80 min.

Two A.M. is a hallucinatory tale of coercion, control, and peer-to-peer surveillance on the fringes of present-day Berlin. Fahrenholz draws on Irmgard Keun’s 1937 novel, After Midnight, for her protagonist, Sanna. Where Keun’s young narrator turned a septic eye on the rise of the Nazis in prewar Germany, Fahrenholz’s Sanna is pitted against her own overbearing family of mind-reading ‘Watchers’, who use their powers to monitor the thoughts and feelings of their human counterparts. As a police state tightens its grip in the face of increasing social unrest, Sanna goes on the run from her volatile Watcher aunt and reconnects with her sister Algin, a blacklisted pop star. But when an escape from her claustrophobic past seems just within reach, events conspire against Sanna and her allies, in an unpredictable fever dream of desire, voyeurism, and political chaos.

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Given its history, Berlin seems the perfect location for a film about surveillance culture: from the Nazis to the Stasi, from the fall of the Wall to the use of iPhones and social media to consume and track contemporary reality and each other, surveillance has known many forms – here especially. Rebooting a post-Weimar youth novel to engage the era of Facebook and Twitter, while shooting in neighborhoods built during the Cold War, Fahrenholz concocts a post-cinematic fantasia that prefers to drift as much between genres as it does among the historical layers of her city. In this sense, the film operates as a kind of augmented reality, using Irmgard Keun’s story as a lens or layer on the present while also leaning into a vague future tense: when are we now?

Surprisingly, no iPhones are depicted in Two A.M.: instead we get phone-generated footage representing the zombie-machinic point-of-view of the Watchers who are swarming New Berlin. This telepathic tribe is not villain or fascist, however, they are more like lurking trolls, sucking up whatever information happens to be in the air — distracted users of urban headspace. Still, the watchers’ way of always being inside every passing affect and daydream feels ominous. These characters circulate like gossip, like fear. And as the film’s protagonist Sanna moves between the overlapping realities of the watchers and the watched, the film itself becomes a meditation on the idea of its own virtual beyond: in the city that’s no longer the city, what happens to cinema? With its strange, Pokemon Go-like drift, Two A.M. is also a kind of allegory for the precarity and impoverishment of the image under post-cinematic conditions. Its story unfolding on one layer, and the existential crisis of the image happening on another, Fahrenholz’s film is a dystopian fairytale about the gentrification of minds. As Berlin becomes reduced to a mere layer within a programmable info- structure, where does the watcher end and the filmmaker begin? Two A.M. is that kind of question.

— John Kelsey

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Loretta Fahrenholz (b.1981 in Starnberg) lives and works in Berlin. Her recent films include Mashes of the Afternoon (2018), My Throat, My Air (2013), Ditch Plains (2013), Grand Openings Return of the Blogs (2012), Que Bárbara (2011), Implosion (2011) and Haust (2010).