Critic Reviews

It's an uncompromising, sophisticated, multi-layered work of art which demands to be met at least halfway.

This isn’t an easy movie, which is to say its meanings and motives have no interest in announcing themselves. But neither is it especially difficult, and if you let it, Schanelec’s gentle, supple stream of images and their attendant associations will bear you dreamily aloft. The meanings, if not necessarily the motives, will follow.

I Was at Home, But… works as a mood piece in the truest sense of the term: once you stop trying to logically assemble the narrative and submit instead to its clashing, enveloping currents of feeling, they form a persuasive story of their own.

In another director’s hands this might all have been a bit of a slog but there is a quiet humor and lightness of touch to Schanelec’s direction and a self-effacing irony to Aistrid’s rambling that saves it from pure maudlinism.

This is a film that stages itself in non-linear narratives, in severe, clinical long takes, in metaphorical observations, and even extended sequences of Shakespearean re-enactment–a film whose aesthetics may be intensely controlled and yet whose narrative is sprawling with meanings and readings.

Angela Schanalec’s film configures itself most potently in hindsight as a punch to the gut.

I Was at Home, But... creates a space where questions are asked, but rarely answered, where things are suggested and never underlined, and every element — camera placement, music, blocking, sound design — is so deliberate that it pulls you into its vortex, and it makes you submit to its severe rhythms.

In I Was at Home, but…, the German director Angela Schanelec seems to have taken her ideas and stashed them deep in a private vault. Every so often, though, she cracks open this movie — with a line, an image, a snatch of a song — offering you fugitive glimpses of an intensely personal world.

What’s both intriguing and enraging about the film is the fact that it so defiantly rejects the language of cinematic storytelling; this is a film which is intended to upend audience expectations.

The filmmakers that Schanelec draws on for inspiration are all masters of one kind of economy or another. The problem is that Schanelec herself is not. Despite its austere, theory-heavy minimalism, I Was At Home, But… is lopsided and lumpy, filled with longueurs in which the brain begins to check out.