Angst is director Gerald Kargl’s only film. But what a film! Grim, depressing, formidably unsettling, it is the psychopath-killer movie the others want to be. Gaspar Noë watched it repeatedly before borrowing bits for his Irreversible, Kargl’s fellow Austrian Michael Haneke surely studied it before he embarked on Funny Games. There’s clear evidence of it in Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove. More recently, Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature – another disturbing shocker – openly acknowledged the debt.
Angst is the full-strength hit, though, so full-strength in fact that the film got banned outright in some places when it came out in 1983, and where it wasn’t banned it was barely shown. Perhaps most disquieting of all is that it is largely a true account of the activities of Werner Knieseck, called simply K here, a man who killed three people simply for the fun of it.
Kargl starts us off about halfway through K’s story, with a disconcerting selfie-cam-style shot of K (a sweaty, boggle-eyed, plausibly insane Erwin Leder) walking through some town or other and knocking on doors. When one is eventually opened, he says simply, “Ich shiesse jetzt,” (“Now I’m going to shoot”) to the old lady standing there, then shoots her stone dead.
From here a voiceover – a psychiatrist of some sort – sketches in K’s life. Abandoned, abused and a troubled child, K turned to torturing animals before winding up in jail for stabbing his mother, then wound up in jail again for the killing we’ve just seen. Not mad, the shrink tells us, which is the big question the film is asking – if this isn’t mad, then what is?
The voiceover then switches to K’s own. He tells us how he kept his head down while he was in jail for the second time, playing along with the psychiatrists who asked him what he dreamt about – flowers, he always replied. Now, he’s out again and after ten years inside has decided that the first thing – the very first – he’s going to do is kill someone. It doesn’t matter who.
With the camera hovering over him, or swinging about madly, K has soon found the three people the rest of the film will be about. An old woman (Edith Rosset), her pretty daughter (Silvia Ryder) and her disabled, wheelchair-using son (Rudolf Götz), plus their dachshund, billed as Kuba.
What Noë, Haneke, Akin and Nash all borrow, to varying degrees, is Kargl’s subjective camera. We are with K the entire time, see everything from his point of view, and thanks to the intense nerviness of the shooting style – director of photography Zbigniew Rybczynski co-wrote the screenplay and arguably deserves a co-directing credit – get an inkling as to his frenzied state of mind.
Are we on side with K though? I don’t think so. The violence it too shocking, abrupt, and the moments where black comedy intrudes only make things worse. The poor mother having her false teeth knocked out of her mouth, the son trying to drag himself away on useless legs and K chasing after him to the upstairs bathroom, the daughter, who will get it worst, with her foot tied to a door handle before she is selected for a killing that’s bloody and brutishly sexualised.
All the while, almost calmly, K keeps up a running commentary in his own head, while the family dog acts as an absurd grotesque commentary of its own – the little dachshund chewing on the old lady’s false teeth, or wagging his tail as K lays into the daughter with a kitchen knife.
Klaus Schulze, of Tangerine Dream fame, also keeps up a commentary, with a score that switches from mockingly chirpy to the Gothic and eventually into a familiar krautrock chug, aping the heightened state of K as he achieves his bloody climax, trousers around his knees.
If the best horror films tap into some fundamental human fear, then this is the one about being targeted by a mindless psychopath who kills for sheer pleasure. There is no arguing with him, or pleading, it only makes it worse. “I just love it when women shiver in deadly fear because of me,” the real Werner Knieseck told the judge at his trial. This is not a film for the faint-hearted, even after all these years.
Angst – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
