The Death King AKA Der Todesking
(1990) 80 min
Rated: NR (gore, suicide, nudity, mutilation, human corpse decay, fish death)
Country: Germany
Director: Jörg Buttgereit
Starring: Nicolas Petche, Hermann Kopp, Heinrich Ebber
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★★☆
Seven episodes, each taking place on a different day of the week, on the theme of suicide and violent death. Throughout a time-lapse video of a human corpse rotting is shown.
Synopsis:
Monday
A man (Kopp) walks past an aquarium, gravestones and arrives home. He pens a few letters and places stamps on their envelopes, leaving them in a neat pile.
The man phones his work to let them know he resigns and offers to use up the rest of his vacation for that purpose too.
Shortly he is seen eating a cooked fish. He burns a few documents in a can. He vacuums his tiny one-room apartment. His walls are decorated with a chart of different fish species and a poster with the phrase “underwater Photos” written on it. He also has a pet goldfish in a bowl.
He has taken down all his posters and entirely cleaned his room, making sure to feed his fish and leaving a letter on his desk.
He takes out a tin of fish and eats it.
The man carefully shaves his face and draws a bath while pills are shown sitting on the edge of bathtub. The man disrobes and climbs into the bathtub. He carefully pushes all the pills out of their foil blister packs and swallows them.
The man lies down in the tub as the poison starts to take effect. Meanwhile the goldfish in the bowl struggles to swim. It seems he poisoned it earlier. The man dies underwater, releasing a plume of liquid from his mouth and the goldfish stops moving entirely.
Mailboxes are seen. The name “Horst Kastecki” can be seen over a box with a fish drawn on it. Another neighbor retrieves his mail and gets the letter.
Tuesday
This neighbor (Ebber) makes his way to a video rental store. He looks at the various tapes and picks up My Dinner With Andre before dropping it for a Naziplsotation film. The man opens his letter as he’s renting his video and finds that his neighbor left him a suicide note. The video store clerk scoffs at the idea and said that the guy was always crazy.
Our video fan goes home, pops the tape into his player, opens a can of beer and watches the film.
The film plays. It’s black and white and claims to be based on real events that happened. Nazi soldiers are torturing a prisoner who they have tied up. They unzip his pants and cut his penis with hedge shears. The Nazis use the severed end of the penis to draw a swastika on the prisoners chest in blood.
The man watching the film is in shock. His girlfriend comes home with groceries. She asks why he hasn’t gone to the birthday party as they had planned already. The man pulls out a gun and shoots her in the head.
He walks over to the blood-splattered wall and breaks a frame with a photo of her in it and places the frame over the blood on the wall.
The camera pans back to show that this is a film playing on the TV of a room in which someone has decided to hang themselves. A chair topples over as feet are shown off the ground.
Wednesday
A woman is walking down a rainy street holding an umbrella in one hand and a letter in the other. She drops the letter in a puddle. The lady sits on a wet bench next to a man who is drenched from the rain.
The man starts to tell her how he loves his wife but every time they have sex she bleeds heavily. They went to a doctor but the doctor said nothing was wrong. His wife told him not to worry about it. He said he never had problems with women before and that his wife didn’t seem to be as concerned as he was.
She would try to calm him with her words but this would make him angry. Their anniversary came and he took the whole day off work. They went to a museum, an expensive restaurant and a cinema. Finally at night they made love. At first all was well, but then he started to feel how wet it was and his wife started crying. His rage took over and he killed her. He split her head from her body.
On the bench, the lady listening, pulls a gun out of her handbag. She points it to the man and tries to fire it, but it doesn’t go off. The man takes the gun from her, cocks it and sticks it into his mouth. He then pulls the trigger.
Thursday
A roadway under a bridge is shown as several names and occupations are flashed on screen of the people who jumped off the bridge.
More footage is shown of time-lapse photography of a human corpse rotting.
Friday
A lady places a lily in a vase. She looks out her window and sees a young man leaning out his window, his lover meets him and the happy couple embrace and kiss. The lady watches them until they are out of sight of the window.
She leaves her apartment and finds a letter at her doorstep. She tries to spy on a neighbor through the mail slot in their door. She then goes back into her apartment and looks through a phone book trying to call the couple she saw earlier but no one answers the phone. Finally she opens the letter.
It’s a chain letter that demands that she commit suicide. “In six days god created heaven and earth on day seven he killed himself.” And finally it exclaims “Let’s die!”
The lady tears up the letter and throws it in a wastebasket, then takes a swig of liquor from a bottle. She finds a stash of chocolates from under her couch and eats a few. She then falls asleep on her couch.
She dreams of when she was a child, walking in on her parents having sex.
She wakes from her dream and walks over to the window, peering down to the window of the couple from before. The camera pans down and shows that the couple is dead in bed and covered in blood.
A vignette of time-lapse video plays of the rotting corpse. The pulse of life and insect movement as the flesh falls apart.
Saturday
A group of people are watching a the first film reel of a person filming themselves grab a gun and test it.
This woman sits down and reads from a book stating that killing in chaos gives the killer a sense of publicity that their life did not have prior to the act of killing and thereby gives their life authentic meaning and attention. She states that they are a martyr of post-modernism.
The woman films herself putting a harness and camera on. She also loads and carries two guns.
The group of people then watch reel two of the woman. The woman enters a concert held in a dark room. She kills the ticket seller and sets a camera to record. She then enters the concert venue and shoots a guitarist. She faces the crowd and starts to shoot into it. One bystander happens to have a gun and shoots her.
The group plays a third reel from the last camera which plays the woman walking into the concert venue.
A time-lapse of the corpse plays as it further decays into mostly a skeleton at this point. Bits of dried flesh and rotten pieces remain, but the bones are primarily shown.
Sunday
A man awakes in a white apartment bedroom, on a mattress on the floor. He grabs his head with a pained expression and lies back down.
Soon he’s seen clutching his head and curling into a fetal position. Rocking back and forth on the mattress. His face is flushed and he cries out in agony.
He crawls off the bed and starts slamming his fists against the floor. He then gets up and starts to bang his head against the wall.
He stares at the one lamp hanging overhead as blood leaks from his nose. The image of the rotting corpse flashes in his mind.
He curls up again and screams. He bangs his head over and over against the wall until he can no longer.
A slow pan over the decayed matter and bones with insects is shown.
A girl is shown drawing a skeleton with a crown on his head. She says “that’s the Death King. He makes people want to die.”
Review:
Darkly melancholic and brooding, Der Todesking is a film that you will either love or despise. It has no actual plot aside from loose vignettes threaded together with the theme of violent death and suicide. This is German angst.
The film is introduced by the corpse, the Todesking, who then appears interspersed between each day. There are echoes of themes like letters, guns, film, alcohol, and sex. Trying to parse the message and “read the bones” is part of the process. Possibly even transformative, like a decaying corpse. And it entirely depends on your state of mind.
In one letter a death cult decrees that god died on the seventh day, so we, too, should die. Because they believe in a rebirth and a life beyond. But the life after isn’t a focus here. Birth is not what we are here for. It’s death primarily, and those that exercise it willingly to themselves and violently thrust it upon others.
Der Todesking has very artistic time-lapse videography as well as scenes that were seemingly done in one take. The life of West Germany in the late 80’s and early 90’s is on display here seemingly anxious, brooding and frustrated.
I could only recommend this film to someone who is ready for a slow-paced art film. Where themes are presented, left for the audience to interpret and ruminate on. There is only a glimpse of hope at the end, with child-like youth and the understanding that life moves forward even after death. We can only be wary of things like Der Todesking and hope we don’t succumb to such thoughts ourselves.