The Sex Thief

Petra and Franziska

The Sex Thief is an attention-grabbing title for a film. In the original German it goes by the more cumbersome Die Beischlafdiebin. Run that compound noun through Google Translate and you’ll find no mention of sex at all. No mention, either – unless AI is more advanced than any of us can imagine – of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a clear influence on a story about a person who is trying to make over another person for reasons rooted in a dark pathology. It’s a Christian Petzold film and so there’s a mysterious female at the centre of it, a woman devastatingly attractive to men but trying to escape her situation (a Petzold constant). Both she … Read more