Pop quiz: can you name a movie that was an influence on the shock cinema of celebrated European filmmakers Gaspar Noé, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier – not to mention a reference point for one of the most controversial American movies of the 80s, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer – that few people have ever heard of? The answer is Angst (1983), the only film by Austrian writer/ director Gerald Kargl.
Banned all over Europe at time of release, Angst is based on the crimes of real-life Austrian serial killer Werner Kniesek, who emerged from an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence for shooting a 73-year-old woman, and immediately broke into a family home to torture and kill the three occupants. Basing a movie on such heinous crimes always raises questions of taste, decency and responsibility, but Kargl’s film does not set out to thrill or titillate. It is a serious drama, a work of art, and few films so successfully burrow into the psychotic brain.
Largely devoid of dialogue but featuring a first-person narration that presents the history and violent reveries of a character credited as K., the Psychopath, Angst follows K. as he is released from prison, considers strangling a taxi driver with his shoelace but panics and flees the cab, then breaks into a secluded home to bind, torture and kill a mother and her adult son and daughter. He bundles the bodies into the trunk of his car (‘The thought that I could have the corpses with me all the time excited me tremendously’) and drives off, stopping to eat a sausage at a café, where he is arrested. And that’s your lot.