The Child I Never Was

How can such difficult subjects as under-age sexual activity, brutal beatings and murders be presented in a way that doesn't alienate the audience, yet still capture the horror and circumstances in a believable manner? The solution? Assign Kai Pieck to the task.

By the film's end we feel neither sympathy nor, oddly, total disgust for this most loathsome of killers. We simply begin to understand, and perhaps that's achievement enough.

The film is airless and mirthless, but it's hardly worthless; in fact in many ways it's more purposeful than the snuff-film scenes of an average "CSI" episode.

Kai S. Pieck's debut feature finds a plaintive, compelling route to the pathology of 1960s German child-killer Jürgen Bartsch.

Though Pieck is to be admired for the rigorousness in telling this chilling story (on what looks like a near zero budget), the film itself remains resolutely unlikable.