Critic-turned-filmmaker Christoph Hochhäusler’s (the founding co-editor of the influential magazine Revolver—often touted as Germany’s Cahiers du cinema) second feature, I am Guilty, is a sui generis coming-of-age portrait and searing existential study of post-Y2K, post-9/11 suburban dread and malaise. With equal measures of formal control and unrestrained vision, Hochhäusler impressively and intuitively oscillates between the surreal subjectivity of Armin Steeb—a recent graduate and young Kurt Cobain look-alike, adrift in the liminality between adolescence and adulthood—and an at-arms-length, incisive observation of the social frameworks the teenager is up against. After a series of experimental acts that, by turns, further alienate and detach him from his milieu, his transgressive impulses take an even darker turn when he unexpectedly bears witness to a fatal car accident.
Director: Christoph Hochhäusler, 2005, Colour, 90 Minutes
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