80
Palmer’s performance is honest and brave (particularly given that she’s often just performing scenes alone), and Shortland deftly switches between locked-door thriller mode and more nuanced character work.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
Slant Magazine by Christopher Gray
Until its hasty climax, Cate Shortland's film is rewardingly patient and psychologically cogent.
60
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
Driven by a compellingly internalized performance from Teresa Palmer as the conflicted prey, this is a case of expert filmmaking craft applied to a familiar story that becomes unrelentingly grim and drawn out after its masterful setup.
80
Between more trickily opaque stretches of character development, Shortland nails a handful of straight-up, nerve-shredding tension sequences, teasing a version of the film that might have tilted into full-bore horror.
75
While some of the story’s turns can feel overtly manipulative, Shortland finds a bracing humanity in depicting the perverse situation of Stockholm syndrome.
75
Bolstered by a strong performance from Teresa Palmer (who only gets better with each role, and seems happy to mix things up when it comes time to pick them), Berlin Syndrome doesn’t break much new ground in the genre, but it’s certainly a worthy entry into it.
75
This isn’t the kind of genre piece that everyone will warm to. Some might find the subject matter too bleak; others might wish it were pulpier. But on the whole, Berlin Syndrome is incredibly effective, while offering a perspective that these kinds of films usually lack. It gets to know the innocent, while rendering the evil banal.
75
Consequence of Sound by Randall Colburn
Berlin Syndrome isn’t a sensational film; the emotions on display are warped and scarred, but rooted in identifiable desires. In some ways, this makes their impact that much more ingrained.
50
It’s a slow-moving/unsatisfying in the end how-will-she-escape thriller dragged out by too many scenes explaining the torturer’s psyche, undone by an ending that no Hollywood studio would allow past the “bad idea in the script” stage.
80
Screen International by Wendy Ide
Australian director Cate Shortland (Somersault, Lore) takes a horror movie premise and imbues it with the knotty emotional complexity of a dysfunctional relationship psychodrama.