System Crasher (Nora Fingscheidt, 2019) (Patreon)

Honestly, I'm not going to pretend that I understand film distribution anymore. Here's a film that was very successful in its native Germany, won the (now discontinued -- oops!) Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlinale, and yet Netflix scoops it up and dumps in into its massive vortex of algorithmic content without so much as a token theatrical release. I mean sure, it's no Atlantics. But it is actually highly accessible and formally inventive at the same time.

In fact, that may be the issue. System Crasher could be said to fall between chairs. It is a film with the (somewhat misguided) populist instincts to include a "building trust over time" montage, but is aesthetically hard-nosed enough to avoid a satisfying ending or, for that matter, a particularly likeable protagonist. There is quite a lot to recommend about System Crasher, but its central performance is its creative and emotional anchor.

Fingscheidt's debut feature is the story of Benni (Helena Zengel), a nine-year-old girl with severe mental and emotional problems. She lacks basic self-control, is very violent, and can fly into a whirlwind of undirected rage at a moment's notice. There are intimations of early childhood abuse (she goes into blackouts of fury if anyone besides her mother touches her face, for example), but Fingscheidt doesn't dwell on Benni's past. Instead, we are dropped into her life in medias res, which is a much more harrowing place to be.

Benni desperately wants to live with her mother Bianca (Lisa Hagmeister), but her mother will not allow this. She has relinquished her daughter to the system, claiming that she does not know how to handle Benni, and that she poses a threat to her two younger children. And although we only see Bianca from the outside, as Benni does, we perceive hints of drug abuse, serial abusive boyfriends, and chronic unemployment. To its credit, System Crasher refrains from judging Bianca until it simply cannot tolerate her neglect any longer. While hardly a conservative film, it does take a stand.

And interestingly enough, System Crasher displays a great deal of sympathy toward those in the child welfare system who are doing their best to help Benni. (This is in marked distinction to most American films, where social workers are typically depicted as bureaucratic busybodies -- a trope that goes all the way back to D.W. Griffith.) One of the only adults Benni trusts is her case worker, Mrs. Bafané (Gabriela Maria Schmeide), who has doggedly advocated on Benni's behalf after the girl has been thrown out of dozens of group-homes for destructive behavior and assault of other kids. The film introduces us to these characters at the precise point where Befané and her staff are running out of options for Benni.

This is where Micha (Albrecht Schuch) comes in. Originally brought on just to escort Benni to and from school and keep her out of trouble, he becomes more involved in her case and, in a partial breach of protocol borne of desperation, takes her for a three-week stay at his cabin in the woods. Without TV or gaming devices, the two establish a routine of chores and a calm, firm discipline. It is remarkably healthy for Benni, but it has to end, and eventually, both the girl and Micha begin developing a father / daughter bond that has to be broken for the (official) psychological good of the both of them.

When I first learned of System Crasher, I thought its title was a bracingly evocative way to describe someone who cannot fit in to the social structures meant to contain them. As it happens, the term ("systemsprenger") is an actual German word for kids who exhaust the social services available to them. Nevertheless, Fingscheidt's formal articulation of Benni as an uncontainable force is the film's driving aesthetic energy. Almost always clad in a hot pink jacket, Benni jumps out visually from the drab institutional surroundings, as well as the lush forest around the cabin. And when the girl has a fit of rage, the screen goes pink, interrupted by flashes of unconscious images -- her mother, her tormentors, the home to which she longs to return.

But System Crasher would be nothing without the gutwrenching performance of young Zengel. Somehow she manages to toggle between the unself-conscious humor and sass of an ordinary nine-year-old girl (albeit one who swears like a longshoreman), and a thrashing, anguished dynamo of primal distress. Her fits of hatred and random violence are tinged with the sorrow of someone who, on some level, understands that she has been forsaken by her own mother, and yet cannot give up hoping that someday things will be put right. Zengel's is one of the greatest performances I've ever seen by a child actor. I frankly don't know how she pulled it off, and if Netflix had put System Crasher into theaters for just a week, Zengel might actually have been a left-field Oscar contender.