Michaela Klingler (Sandra Hüller) is a twenty-one-year-old living in the rural Germany of the seventies who has just been accepted for a place in university. She wants to study to be a teacher, but her delight at securing a place is tempered by the reactions of her parents, especially her mother (Imogen Kogge), a devout Catholic. Adding to her problems is the fact that she is an epileptic, and although she is on medication and has not had a seizure in six months it is always in the back of her mind that the condition may return. So much can go wrong for Michaela, and it does.
Requiem was one of two, almost simultaneous films that were inspired by the real life case of Annaliese Michel, a twenty-six-year-old German woman who came to believe that she had become possessed by the devil. Unfortunately for her, the Church agreed and put her through a gruelling exorcism which eventually ended her life in 1976. With such an emotionally troubling subject, here the director Hans-Christian Schmid and his writer Bernd Lange could have travelled the more sensational route adopted by their "rivals" who made The Exorcism of Emily Rose, but they did not.
The tone is kept low key and intimate throughout, making the crazed outbursts that grow to punctuate the story all the more disturbing. The Emily Rose people adopted a Christian angle to their production, so that the reality of the Devil in their afflicted character's life was all too genuine in a move that was offensively reductive and pushing an agenda that would help no one, but here there's a more ambiguous approach, and you could easily regard what happens to Michaela as a breakdown - not only her own mental distress, but the breakdown of support around her from those who want to help but are at a loss how to cope.
At the heart of this is a remarkable, heartbreaking performance by Sandra Hüller, who guides us through poor Michaela's suffering while coming across as immensely sympathetic even in her darkest hours where she lashes out at those who wish to alleviate her problems. If there is a villain, it is not any supernatural force trying to claim her sorry soul but Michaela's own mother, who makes her feel unbearable guilt for leaving the family home to strike out on her own and enjoy a sense of liberation from the restrictive bonds of her religious upbringing and her mother's sanctimony.
Michaela manages to get at least one friend in the person of Hanna (Anna Blomeier), a familiar face from back home who is not so pleased to see her at first, but when she finds Michaela can help her with her course work she warms to the girl. She also gets a boyfriend, Stefan (Nicholas Reinke), but after a few months of this, doing what comes naturally with him sends her into a heavy cloud of regret, and she begins to suffer psychosis which leads her to stop taking her medication. Michaela's beliefs lead her to think she is being tormented by demons, when she is actually mentally ill and if there's a drawback to Requiem it's that the narrative is frustratingly predictable. Not much they can do about that with it being based on a true story, but you'll be wishing that the victim had received the help she needed rather than fall prey to superstition. It becomes clear that Michaela's most damning issue was that her parents, the older generation, in fact, did not trust her so that eventually she could not trust herself, with tragic results.
