Tommy (Philipp Hezoucky) falls in love with Tamara (Christine Artner) -
and she with him - and before you know it, they spend the night together
at her place. But when Tommy is leaving again, he is run over by a car.
While recovering, Tommy asks his friend Christian (Matthias Hoffmann)
to get in touch with Tamara - but Christian simply can't find her, the
appartment she lived in is empty and has been so for months, in the
building nobody seems to even have heard of her, and her cellphone number
is a phony.
Once out, Tommy tries to track down Tamara himself, but all he finds is
a terribly frightened friend of hers (Agnes Julia Redl), who at first just
wants to get rid of him but then hands him an address of a church
somewhere in the countryside. From the church's priest Tommy learns of an
old legend about a farmer (Benjamin Plautz) and his wife (Katharina Vana),
who once took a stranger (Stefan Müller) in as farmhand. However,
eventually the farmer got jealous enough of the stranger to kill him ...
and accidently injure his wife. Her injuries are grave enough that the
farmer would do anything to heal her, and when the church wouldn't help,
he made a deal with the devil - but the devil tricked him and let his wife
die after all, only now the farmer's soul belongs to the devil. As it
turns out, the stranger was some kind of bait who haas struck a deal witht
he devil himself to bring him 1.000 souls ... and Tommy figures he is next
on the list, so he steals a talisman, somehow linked to the story.
Eventually, things take a turn for the worse when Tommy finds the woman
who gave him the address of the church dead, later while investigating,
Christian dies as well ... and suddenly Tommy faces the stranger, the
devil's bait - however, the stranger for some reason needs the talisman,
and Tommy not only won't give it to him, he also discovers the stranger's
Achilles' heel: true love, something the stranger shared with the farmer's
wife. Ultimately, the stranger lets Tommy go in exchange for the talisman
and goes after teh devil himself - while the devil is eager to go after
Tommy himself, when ...
Tommy wakes up from a coma, with Tamara and Christian (still alive) in
the room. It might all have been just a dream, but the church and the
talisman really exist ...
Regarding its screenplay, this film is far from perfect: The whole
thing is overly convoluted, does not always make sense on closer
inspection, the dialogue is stilted and poorly written (causing the
non-professional actors to trip over it time and again), and the film
drags on for way too long (two hours where one and a half would have
easily sufficed). The film's saving grace though is its directotial
effort: It looks wonderfully polished despite the fact that it was
obviously made on a low budget, it creates atmosphere and/or suspense at
just the right moments, it does not relie to heavily on special effects
and it by and large omits fashionably flashy but ultimately empty
cameratricks. If European horror is to have a future, it should look
like this - too bad Jenseits doesn't have a script to live up to
its looks though.
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