Angst: The Austrian POV Killer Film

Gerald Kargl made one feature film. It cost him his money, it was pulled from cinemas and effectively banned across much of Europe, it was unavailable in any decent form for the better part of twenty years, and he never directed another. Angst is the film, it runs about eighty minutes, and it is the most disciplined piece of horror filmmaking I know of that almost nobody saw until the internet dug it up.

I came to it through the whisper network — a bad copy passed around in the mid-2000s among people who had read that there was an Austrian film even Gaspar Noé thought was too much. That is a terrible way to meet any film and a particularly terrible way to meet this one, because Angst is not an endurance test with a reputation attached. It is a formal experiment executed with total precision, and the precision is the point.

What the film actually is

A man is released from prison. He has served time for a violent crime. Within hours of walking out, he is looking for someone to kill. He finds an isolated house, and he goes in.

That is the plot. There is no investigation, no pursuit, no psychiatrist, no third act. The film stays with him from the gate to the end, and the only voice you hear for most of the running time is his, narrating himself in a flat continuous monologue that never stops and never explains anything satisfactorily.

The material draws on a real case — Werner Kniesek, who in 1980 murdered three members of a family in a house near Salzburg after being let out on day release. Kargl and co-writer Zbigniew Rybczyński built the film’s interior monologue substantially from the killer’s own recorded statements, and that decision is why the voiceover has its specific texture: it is self-pitying, banal, obsessed with childhood grievance, and completely uninterested in the people it is describing. It sounds like a man explaining a hobby.

The camera is the film

Zbigniew Rybczyński shot it, and this is the reason Angst matters as cinema rather than as a rumour. Rybczyński was a Polish experimental animator and filmmaker who won an Academy Award for the short Tango in 1983, the same year this came out — a genuine avant-garde figure, briefly employed by a horror film, and given permission to solve it as a formal problem.

His solution is a set of body rigs that hold the camera at a fixed distance from the killer, so the frame moves when he moves. The camera precedes him, circles him, hangs off him. It cannot get away from him and neither can you. The effect is nothing like a handheld shot and nothing like a point-of-view shot: it is a lens that has been welded to a person, and it produces a physical sensation of being tethered that I have never had from another film.

Then there are the overheads. Rybczyński repeatedly lifts the camera to a high, steep, canted angle and turns the house into a floor plan — a diagram with a man moving through it. The shift is brutal. One second you are strapped to his shoulder inside his own narration, and the next you are looking down at him from a position of total detachment, watching a small figure cross a room. The film keeps swapping between maximum intimacy and maximum distance, and the swapping is what generates the dread.

The reason this is craft rather than a gimmick is what it does to sympathy. A conventional point-of-view shot invites identification — you are looking through his eyes, so you are him. Rybczyński’s rig denies that. You are attached to him and outside him simultaneously, held at arm’s length for eighty minutes, forced to watch the shoulders and the back of the head of a man you are never permitted to become. The film generates proximity without complicity, which is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do and which nearly every serial-killer film since has failed to manage.

Klaus Schulze does the rest. Schulze was a founding member of Tangerine Dream and one of the central figures of German electronic music, and his score is a low, patient, pulsing thing that refuses to comment. It does not build to the violence. It does not release afterwards. It just continues, with the same indifference as the killer’s voice, and the effect is that the film seems to be happening inside a machine that has no opinion about any of it.

The real ancestor is Michael Powell

The lazy comparison is Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and the chronology alone should stop it: John McNaughton’s film was shot in 1986, three years after this. Angst got there first, and it went further.

The genuine ancestor is Peeping Tom. Michael Powell’s 1960 film is the origin of the idea that the camera and the murderer can be the same apparatus, and it is also the origin of the industry’s response to that idea — Powell was destroyed for it, his career in Britain finished overnight. Kargl walked into the same wall twenty-three years later and got the same result. There is a straight line from one to the other: two films that made the act of watching into the crime, and two directors who paid for it with everything.

The other ancestor is Fritz Lang’s M, which established that a murderer could be the protagonist of a film and remain morally unavailable to the audience. Lang gives Beckert a speech at the end; Kargl gives his man eighty minutes of speech and it clarifies nothing at all. That is Angst’s refinement on Lang — the interiority is total, and it is useless.

Downstream, the film’s fingerprints are visible in Gaspar Noé’s work, which he has said so himself. The tethered camera and the relentless first-person narration of I Stand Alone come straight out of here. And the wider question the film poses — whether documentary-grade realism about violence is an argument against it or an appetite for it — is the same question that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had raised nine years earlier by lying about being real.

The honest case against it

It is monotonous, and some of the monotony is a choice and some of it is a limitation. The middle stretch in the house runs long, and the film’s refusal to modulate means there is a point at which the horror becomes procedure. Kargl would say that is the film’s thesis. He would be partly right and partly covering.

The voiceover explains too much. The killer’s childhood is laid out in a degree of psychoanalytic detail that sits oddly against the film’s otherwise total refusal to interpret, and the effect is to hand the audience a causal story the rest of the film is at pains to withhold. The film is at its best when the man is simply unaccountable.

And the victims are barely people. That is defensible — the film is showing you his perception, and to him they are objects — but the defence has a cost, and the cost is that Angst has less to say about the murdered than about the murderer. This is the same charge that has followed the whole subgenre since, and the film does not escape it just by being rigorous.

Where to find it

For a long time the answer was a fifth-generation tape and a lot of luck. Cult Epics restored it and put it out properly in the 2010s, and the restoration is a revelation, because Rybczyński’s images depend on clarity — the overheads read as diagrams only when you can see the whole floor, and a murky copy turns the film’s best formal move into visual noise. It also turned up on the video nasty side of a lot of European censorship arguments, and the history of its suppression is part of the artefact.

Watch it once, in daylight, sober, and do not put it on for anyone as a dare. It is not a party film and treating it as one is the only genuinely disreputable way to engage with it.

The verdict: Angst is the purest formal statement horror cinema has made about violence, and it is a film I admire enormously and have watched three times in twenty years. Kargl and Rybczyński built a machine for making a murderer inescapable and unavailable at the same time, and the machine still works exactly as designed. That it destroyed its director’s career is grimly consistent with everything the film is about.

Spoilers below

There is no twist. That is the most important thing to say about the ending, and the thing that makes it unbearable.

The killer’s competence is the film’s cruellest joke. He is, throughout, extraordinarily bad at this. He fumbles. He panics. He drops things. The murders in the house are protracted and clumsy and go wrong repeatedly, and the film shows the clumsiness with the same flat attention it gives everything else. The genre’s usual grammar — the efficient predator, the clean kill — is simply absent, and what replaces it is the recognition that real violence is mostly incompetence and effort. It takes a long time and it is difficult and it is degrading for everyone in the room.

What ends the film is not a confrontation. It is an errand. He puts the bodies in a car, and he drives, and he stops, and he is arrested because of the most mundane possible failure of attention — the disparity between the enormity of what he has done and the banality of how he is caught is the entire final movement.

The last passage returns to the diner where he sat at the start. Same room, same indifference, same camera. The film closes the loop and refuses the catharsis, and the voiceover keeps going right to the edge. He was released once. The structure implies he could be released again. Kargl leaves you with the administrative fact and no comfort attached to it, and that flat ending is why the film has never dated: it has no verdict to hand you, only a man who is still explaining himself.