Character

Freud and Kafka hover over Mike van Diem's Character, like ghastly ghosts. Set in 1920s Rotterdam, this nightmarish fairy tale is about an up-and-coming lawyer (Fedja van Huet, who looks like a young Peter Lorre) who can legitimately claim to be both a bastard and a son of a bitch--a bastard because his parents never got married, a son of a bitch because his mother has barely spoken a word to him his entire life. And she's the nice one! A cinematic bildungsroman about the need to overcome our parents, Character is beautifully filmed--an expressionist landscape in black and blue.