Im Schatten

Berlin as a place of transit: the city locations that gangster Trojan (Mišel Matičević) traverses on foot or by car range from bright and shimmering to grey and anonymous. Recently released from jail, he starts settling old scores, weighing up new robberies, finding accomplices and observing what’s happening on the streets, in carparks and gas stations through the car or restaurant windows that offer him protection. But soon he himself enters the sights of the two hitman hired to kill him, to say nothing of brutal, corrupt police officer Meyer (Uwe Bohm). With precise framings and in an almost matter-of-fact manner, Thomas Arslan describes the everyday work of a criminal loner, from buying guns to dealing with adversaries, creating scenes which cast a spell on the viewer from the very start. IM SCHATTEN (Germany 2010) is a genre film as abstract as it is remarkable, which opens a window onto the city (sometimes literally) and its topographies, which come across as concrete yet constructed, recognisable yet fractured. (Milena Gregor)