Lose Your Head *** (2013, Fernando Tielve, Marko Mandic, Sesede Terziyan) – Classic Movie Review 12,383

Fernando Tielve stars as a young Spanish gay party tourist who gets lost in Berlin’s infamous club scene, in the dark and disturbing 2013 German psycho thriller film Lose Your Head. He becomes dangerously obsessed with the older, frankly crazy Viktor.

Fernando Tielve stars as a young Spanish gay party tourist who gets lost in Berlin’s infamous club scene, in writer-director Stefan Westerwelle’s darkly teasing and deeply disturbing 2013 German psycho thriller Lose Your Head. Westerwelle has both Vertigo and Don’t Look Now in mind, but his film is unique. Some will prefer a straightforward suspense thriller, but this is a cleverly arty one, leaving genre behind, but still with strong suspense and mystery though.

Luis (Fernando Tielve) is looking to spend a carefree summer weekend in Berlin. Reeling from a breakup with his boyfriend Carlos (Jonás Beramí) back in Spain, he wants to party away the pain, make new friends, and perhaps fall in love again. At a club, he encounters wild party girl Grit (Samia Muriel Chancrin) and meets up with the older, wilder, frankly crazy Viktor (Marko Mandic), a Ukrainian illegal resident, and becomes dangerously obsessed with him over a series of encounters. Viktor keeps asking if Luis trusts him, and eventually, the answer, against all odds and all sense, is yes. Luis says of Viktor: ‘He threw me in the river and I fell in love with him’.

However, Luis’ resemblance to a missing Greek student called Dimitri gets him involved in a series of mysterious events. Luis seems to be thrilled by the danger of suspecting that Viktor has killed Dimitri. The film starts cross-cutting Luis’s arrival in Berlin, with the story of what turn out to be Dimitri’s distraught relatives (Sesede Terziyan as Elena and Stavros Yagoulis as Kostas) desperately searching for him. The three in a while meet up. With his plot going grippingly well in the film’s mid section, Stefan Westerwelle deliberately loses the plot, blurring the lines between paranoia and reality, as we are take inside the hero’s head. Unfortunately there is a serial killer at work in Berlin, and he is chopping off men’s heads, so Luis had better keep his head, otherwise he will lose it.

Tielve gives a likable performance, credible and charming in a tricky role, and Mandic is weirdly compelling as the older lover and possible psycho.

The film tackles the excesses of the Euro club scene, drug culture and gay sex, showing it all frankly and clearly but far from celebrating it. The film is not preachy, though, and there is no particular message, unless you think Vertigo and Don’t Look Now have messages. Don’t go to Europe, don’t get involved with strangers, that kind of thing.

The film is inspired by the true story of a young Portuguese man who disappeared some years earlier after a night at Berghain. The Berghain nightclub is named after its location near the border between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain in Berlin, and is a short walk from Berlin Ostbahnhof main line railway station. Founded in 2004 by friends Norbert Thormann and Michael Teufele, it has  become one of the world’s most famous clubs, and has been called the ‘world capital of techno’.

Patrick Schuckmann is co-director.

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,383

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