Kai S. Pieck's debut feature finds a plaintive, compelling route to the pathology of 1960s German child-killer Jürgen Bartsch.
The Child I Never Was(Ein Leben lang kurze Hosen tragen)
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Germany · 2002
1h 23m
Director Kai S. Pieck
Starring Tobias Schenke, Ulrike Bliefert, Walter Gontermann, Jürgen Christoph Kamcke
Genre Drama, Crime
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A serial killer dispassionately discusses the nuts and bolts of his grisly avocation, as well as the youthful traumas which helped to mold him into a psychopath, in this disturbing independent drama from Germany, based on the true story of of Germany's most famous child murderer Juergen Bartsch who, between the ages of 15 and 19, abused, tortured and killed four schoolboys in the Ruhr region of Germany from 1962 to 1966.
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Though Pieck is to be admired for the rigorousness in telling this chilling story (on what looks like a near zero budget), the film itself remains resolutely unlikable.
By the film's end we feel neither sympathy nor, oddly, total disgust for this most loathsome of killers. We simply begin to understand, and perhaps that's achievement enough.
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