Small budget – small space – great idea – extreme execution: ACH DU SCHEISSE! shows how you can make a film, and how you can worm yourself out of the biases and cliches of German cinema: that it is soft and harmless, suitable for TV and the masses. Lukas Ringer avoids that at all costs. And there are plenty of possibilities for easy toilet humor which is also a popular ingredient of German cinema...

Frank wakes up. He‘s in a porta potty. The porta potty is in a construction pit. Frank has to free himself. He has a hammer and a measuring stick, a laser rangefinder and then there‘s also the mayor‘s suitcase. The cellphone is down below in the toilet bowl, the door is locked, and Frank‘s right arm is nailed down with an iron rod. In half an hour, everything will explode. Frank has to free himself and by the by he reconstructs what happened in memory flashes, talks to the toilet lid and solves a psychopathic crime. He‘s an architect, planning is his life, that‘s a benefit, but the cellphone falls in the toilet with faeces, the burning pants that he maneuvers almost gives him smoke poisoning and the bunny that he lures to the detonator hops away. It‘s about betrayal and a relationship crisis, madness and murder, a strange man with a chamois beard; it‘s about blood and disgust and the unequivocal will to survive which makes all of these circumstances irrelevant.

Lukas Rinker makes the most use of the toilet setting and the figure of Frank. It is rare to see someone play with minimalism so inventively. Rinker confidently switches between a highly tense thriller, pitch-black comedy and violent splatter that is definitely not meant for the very sensitive – a film like this hasn‘t been made in Germany before.

Harald Mühlbeyer (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy