A haunting portrait of a well-established German family living on the outskirts of Berlin in their ideal world, but are slowly shaken by external influences.
The Summer House (2014)
Das Sommerhaus (original title)
The Larsens are a picture perfect family from the German upper-middle class. They have everything that means comfort and should mean happiness. Business success, a stylish, light-flooded home and a full scholarship for their daughter to study in England. However, the head of the family, Markus, an architect, lives a secret, bisexual double life as his wife Christine and their eleven-year-old daughter Elisabeth drown in unendurable loneliness. Markus realizes that he has a strong yearning for one of his daughter’s school friends, Johannes, 12, also the son of his tax penalty-bedeviled business partner, Christopher. He succeeds in getting closer to Johannes and binds the boy to himself with ever-increasing intensity. His wife is desperately aware of the emotional distance of her husband, but only her daughter Elizabeth, reacting to the sexually laden atmosphere, sees through the lies and secrets that she instinctively knows to be an growing, disruptive threat to the entire family. As Markus loses control of the situation and in a final moment of strength, pushes Johannes away, the action nevertheless moves them all remorselessly into the abyss.
Review:
Even when violence is reached in the progression of THE SUMMER HOUSE’s gripping yarn, no blood is spilled for viewer eyes. This psychothriller is utterly calm and quiet throughout, yet it will tie up your guts like combat boot laces. THE SUMMER HOUSE is perhaps the most frank approach to such subject matter that I’ve seen in a movie, and it’s a topic rarely approached by filmmakers, at least in my viewing experience.
Daddy’s deviant desires and dastardly dalliances make his wife’s penchant for swinging seem like a chapter right out of the family values handbook. The fallout is a monumental nightmare, built up with dispassionate observation by the filmmakers. These irrevocably life-altering repercussions strip the characters to the bone, baring to our scrutiny the real nature of their personalities.
One villain of the piece stands out front and center from relatively early, but that person is not the only character operating on less than honorable motives.
Nor is morality a black-and-white proposition in all instances. Consider that the hand of violence, with its eleventh-hour game-changer, is attached to one of the characters who becomes collateral damage during the course of the explosion of morally bankrupt behavior in THE SUMMER HOUSE. Some things are exactly as they seem while others are anything but.
The movie is as chilling as it is gripping. Intensely uncomfortable but relentlessly compelling, THE SUMMER HOUSE ushers us into a grim psychothriller masquerading as a dreadfully dark drama. Unpredictable and utterly honest, this is one film that needs nothing more than a type of very real human evil to chill us to the bone. No ghosties or gore here. Not necessary.
