Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story

I wanted to look away, I tried to walk away, and yet I found myself watching intently. The grisly story unfolds as Russells character investigates a serial killer for her thesis. The more she finds out the more she seems to want to know and the audience is brought along with her. I will not giveaway anything because it would ruin it for anyone. Having never heard of the film I mostly watched it since it was endorsed by Fangoria Magazine and admittedly after watching its obvious why. There is no bright spot in this dark, chilling tale, somewhere halfway thinking how can I continue watching I don't want to know the truth was I did want to know, maybe this frightened me more than the tale itself. Towards the end I was the so engrossed I couldn't stop and had to finish it, and like characters final reaction so was mine.

I can't help but wonder, after reading so many negative reviews, if people really got this movie. Yes, it is a commentary on a depraved culture. But, as the narration points out, the important things are not what makes us different from people like cannibal Oliver Hartwin, but what makes us the same.

As Hartwin, Thomas Kretschmann does a great job in a role that can be described in a mastery of understatement as "difficult." He plays a man who fantasizes about eating human flesh. He finds the yin to his yang in Simon Groembeck (Thomas Huber, equally superb), a man who's veritable truckload of I.S.S.U.E.S. see him abandoning his GQ model boyfriend to be eaten by a guy with a Herman Munster haircut and a predilection for beige. Go figure. They hook up over that great haven for all the demented and depraved - the Internet. Go team!

Kerri Russell narrates the film in a somewhat unnecessary framing device. Quite frankly, what I found most irritating about the film were the most over obvious attempts to sell it internationally - Russell is the known "face" but the majority of the cast is comprised of German actors. Why not film it in German? Why not drop Russell altogether and instead focus on the relationship between the two men? A relationship which is, in its own way, oddly affecting. For as the title implies...this is a love story.

Well, come on. How many movies does Hollywood churn out annually based on the central premise of a woman (once upon a time Meg Ryan, lately her mini-me Reese Witherspoon) and a man (preferably Hugh Jackman but Mark Ruffalo or one of the Wilson brothers in a pinch) who are made for each other? When you really examine it, this film is based around the same premise. These are two men who are, in Russell's own words as she drably narrates, a perfect match. Far too much screen time is given to Russell poking around Hartwin's farm house and looking generally freaked out, at the expense of the developing of the relationship between two true oddballs. This is not monster and victim - these are two lonely men who have found each other, and not nearly enough time is devoted to the why of it all.

In it's look, the film very much honors it's subject matter, to great effect. It is shot mostly in muted tones, yet avoids the trap similar films have fallen into - namely looking too dark and leaving the audience wondering if they need to turn the contrast on their TV up. Very much a 1970s horror movie feel. Clever tricks abound - we see a grisly horror film being enjoyed by Hartwin reflected on his eyeball in an extreme close up, while in an earlier flashback the camera travels under the sheets to watch him reading under his bedclothes as a child. The running time is concise, a mere hour and a half, with the majority of the film's most difficult to watch scenes occurring in the final twenty minutes. There is the odd unexpected moment of black humor - yes, you feel guilty for chuckling - while the bare bones script is stripped of exposition and all the better for it. On the whole it is a well made movie, not what you'd call entertaining, but a worthy watch none the less.

Both this film and Marian Dora's "Cannibal" were inspired by the unbelievably inhuman yet real-life horror case of Armin "The Rohtenburg Cannibal" Meiwes. Meiwes was a lonely and introvert homosexual who placed an internet add, looking for volunteers to get slaughtered and consumed by him. It didn't take that long before he got a response from Bernd Jürgen Brandes, another homosexual who treasured a life-long dream of having his penis chopped off and eaten. Like the script states at several occasions: these two formed a perfect match. Even though both films remain faithful to the grueling and sickening facts, they are two completely different viewing experiences. This film is more like a 'light' version of the facts (but, mind you, still shocking enough to upset people with a weak stomach), whereas "Cannibal" is a downright brutal and uncompromising film. "Grimm Love" supposedly takes place after the facts and the story is re-enacted via the research and profiling of an American psychology student (Keri Russell) residing in Germany to work on her thesis. This wraparound story is actually rather redundant, since Russell only appears on screen in order to link together all the flashbacks that build up towards the two men's fatal cannibalistic meeting. Unlike "Cannibal", this film dedicates a large amount of time digging up the men's backgrounds and illustrating their personalities. The voluntary victim Bernd Jürgen Brandes (renamed Simon Grombeck) forcefully hated the reproduction organ between his legs and apparently blamed himself for his mother's suicide, because she once caught him and another boy playing doctor. Armin Meiwes (renamed Oliver Hartwin) had issues with his mother as well, but she was more of a dominant and overly protective type. He developed cannibalistic tendencies after she died and eventually the endless opportunities of the almighty internet brought these wandering souls together. I find it praiseworthy that both films, especially considering the gruesome themes, succeed in clarifying to the audiences that this is, in fact, primarily an (unusual) love story rather than a gratuitous exploitation flick. It's a portrait of two men who're social outcasts due to their unacceptable sexual desires. This was even clearer in "Cannibal", since the two men shared all the screen time together as from the opening sequence, but even "Grimm Love" successfully reflects the affectionate and deeper relationship between the two 'monsters'. However, this movie suffers from a handful of dreadfully tedious moments and it sadly remains too vague about the disturbing things that happened after the castration. Meiwes stored Brandes' corpse on a meat hook in his basement and continued to eat his pal for several more months after the actual killing. This film only briefly mentions this little detail somewhere at the beginning. The cinematography is pleasingly dark and depressing, and the slow pacing and grim set-pieces contribute to the building up of an overall uncanny atmosphere as well. Martin Weisz' direction is subtly creepy and he clearly doesn't aim for sensationalism here. The German actors are very competent as well, even though they are for some reason forced to speak their lines in hesitant English… My main complaint regarding this production, as stated by other reviewers already as well, is the international character of the film. Why the involvement of a fictionalized American student character working on a psychology thesis? Why narrate the story through flashbacks, for that matter? Russell's role is entirely redundant and her character isn't even plausible anyway. For someone who has been obsessed and fascinated with the case for more than 3 years, she really sucks at watching graphic cannibalism on tape.

This was inspired by the real life case of Armin Meiwes who put an ad over an Internet site looking for a willing victim to be slaughtered and their flesh consumed. What made the case so unusual was he was not only serious but another man named Bernd Jurgen Brandes obliged apparently without being physically forced as a share of the event was captured on videotape. "Grimm Love" is a tale that paces as a dark narrative drama with a fictional college student named Katie Armstrong, played by Keri Russell, returning to where these two lived in Germany in an attempt to get inside their heads for a research paper.

Instead of concentrating on horror and shock, the filmmakers switch back and forth between the present with Ms. Armstrong and also in the past with the two men who eventually meet up in a kind of twisted, interconnected fate. Oliver (based on Meiwes) is shown as far back as adolescence with his father leaving, trouble fitting in at school, as well as having no life apart from taking care of his ailing mother. He's alone and looking for companionship, though his way of connecting with people isn't hugs, kisses or long conversations, but instead a longing fixation of consuming the flesh of someone special to feel stimulation and closeness.

Simon (based on Brandes) is a homosexual who fears showing his feelings in public out of misunderstandings and ridicule. He has severe depression and searches for a sense of belonging through some normal and not so normal ways. He looks at extreme fetishes on an Internet chatroom as a way of feeling alive from a life that never accepted him. In 2003, Gay Chinese actor/composer Leslie Cheung was successful but still committed suicide by jumping off a building, likewise Simon also has things going for him, though it's too much and he wants to meet his end with symbolism that directly "severs" ties with his burdensome sexuality that gives him a guilt complex from his mother's suicide at an early age.

Dodging the pulse-pounding route of "Silence of the Lambs," this comes across more like "Kalifornia" by hearing the thoughts and experiences as they come through with narration. It also flows as slow as Cronenberg's "Spider" in an attempt at an on-the-surface character study of these atypical individuals' thought processes and motivations. Though the college student's montages about how these two men affect her take up extra screen time away from finding out more. There are metaphors and poetic wordings interspliced to sway the audience towards deep sympathy for these two fractured individuals. Sometimes making you think with introspection, but at other times being desperate to make a point and forcing their way in, like some of Keri Russells' obvious voice overs instead of letting the camera do the talking.

"Grimm Love" isn't going to be like watching a biopic on the History Channel by just stating the events as is, as the filmmakers are doing select reporting to be more convincing towards a certain compassionate, sentimental way of thinking than letting your own thoughts flow free. To some it's going to be touching, to others it's going to be sympathy for the devil. The heavy leaning towards the first here can take away from the experience as it feels written with a prior agenda in mind, not to mention before all things were considered in the case as the real events took place in only 2001 and an overturned verdict came in 2006 when this came out. I like the angle of diving into their background even if it breaks psychology down for the layman, though this would have worked better as a biography with anecdotes from relatives, friends and experts. Or if a story is to be had, something like the route taken with "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer," where the director of that film said he feels that he shouldn't have to decide a stance for the viewer, that that's up to them.

This isn't an exploitation film that takes advantage of real events such as "Men Behind the Sun" did, as it's more suggestive than showing candid nudity and bodily infliction like "Cannibal" about the same events. Though by the time it closes--right after the infamous scenario between the men that's akin to the real life events in "In the Realm of the Senses"--it can't seem to decide what it wanted to be. In the beginning and middle it was going out of its way to reason with the audience that these guys aren't just a couple of kooks with mental issues like the media sensationalized. Though by its close they left the story up in the air and ambiguous with the young woman being either deeply moved or having a change of heart. It makes me believe she was only included as a ploy for the writers to speak through her and then at the end decided it was time enough to let the audience choose. Not to mention at an inopportune time as it ends abruptly and doesn't show what happened next. (See my profile and click chronological for the second review of "Cannibal" or the third review "Downloading Nancy.") (Also submitted on http://fromblacktoredfilmreviews.blogspot.com/)

Grimm Love recreates the lives of the notorious cannibal who via the Internet found someone willing to be cannibalized. It is framed within a story of an American student in Germany writing her master's thesis on the topic from a psychological perspective.

Names have been changed for the movie, but we meet both characters in their childhood. Simon, the willing victim, was a tormented homosexual boy who is traumatized by the suicide of his mother, presumably because she caught him with another boy. He is now in an apparently fulfilling relationship with Felix but still consumed by guilt. The cannibal, Oliver, was never allowed to develop as a man because of his overbearing and controlling mother. As a child he meets another kid and they spy on butchers slaughtering pigs and gets into watching real death films. Cannibalism becomes his sexual fantasy and on message boards he solicits someone to become his meal. Some who are interested back off before he takes their lives. Until he meets Simon, who thinks he can find peace only once someone removes his piece.

Presumably everything we are told is true, in particular how events unfold when the two meet as the cannibal actually filmed their encounter. That tape is the only thing that gives importance to the story of the American student. Someone offers her a copy of the film and once she sees it, it's more than she asked for.

Grimm Love, a changed but effective title, making reference to the horrific "children" stories by the brothers Grimm with which all German children have been terrorized, is a very good movie. It is not pleasant to see though. There are a lot of homosexual scenes and some gruesome scenes at the end. But the movie humanizes the characters. It's not a movie that seeks to make cannibalism cool or that delights in gore or that wants to demonize the cannibal, even though the monster in him can't be eliminated. These two characters are tormented, traumatized, suffering souls, who never managed to overcome their childhood pain, in particular Simon. The tone of the movie is mild and slower. Oliver is calculative but gentle, if one can say that. The movie is mostly filmed in tones of yellow and brown and is rather dark looking. Direction and acting are excellent. This movie is smart and succeeds at giving you insight into the darkest of dark places of the human being and of life. A recurring question is, just how was it possible that these two people with such unique but matching preferences were able to meet. An astonishing event indeed.