Cut Off (film)

The film stars Moritz Bleibtreu, Jasna Fritzi Bauer, Lars Eidinger, and Fahri Yardim.

At the same time, Prof. Dr. Paul Herzfeld, a medical examiner working for the Federal Criminal Police Office, is engaged in an autopsy at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin.

The capsule contains a small slip of paper with the cell phone number of his 17-year-old daughter Hannah, whom he rarely sees since separating from her mother.

As he searches for his daughter, we seemingly witness the rape and torture of Hannah, who is goaded into suicide by Sadler, who leaves behind a noose.

Linda, who is disgusted and a vegetarian, only approves of an external necropsy, which she performs following Herzfeld's instructions, while Ender tries to lighten the mood with jokes.

The object turns out to be the plastic capsule of a Kinder Surprise and contains a photograph depicting the retired judge Friedericke Töven who lives on Heligoland.

Linda and Ender break into Töven's house in Heligoland and find a woman's corpse there, which they also bring to the autopsy room.

There, next to a dead pig, they find evidence relating to the sadist Jan Erik Salder, the man who is holding Hannah captive.

Ender wants to secure the electricity supply at the Heligoland clinic, and comes back to the autopsy room, in which Linda has locked herself, with a knife in his shoulder.

Herzfeld, after thinking of Lily and Rebecca, and knowing what could almost have befallen Hannah, cuts Sadler's fingers off with a knife, causing him to fall to his death.

Other scenes were shot in Berlin, for instance in an abandoned factory building in the Schöneweide district[5] and in an auditorium of the Benjamin Franklin University Hospital.

Randy Myers of the San Jose Mercury News writes: ""Cut Off" is the equivalent of an absorbing if preposterous cinematic page-turner; you simply can't stop watching.

"[11] Kaspar Heinrich of Zeit online, a German newspaper, says: “the overloaded story is the pretext for this orgy of violence and autopsy [...] to last more than two hours.

Heinrich speaks of an “outrageous story” and sees the film in the context of a generally bad reputation of German thrillers.

"I[...]m Widerspruch zwischen dem romanhaften Prinzip der eskalierenden Theoriebildung und dem filmischen Prinzip der sinnlichen Intensität wird Alvarts Film zunehmend aufgerieben" (In [...] contradiction between the novelistic principle of escalating theorizing and the cinematic principle of sensual intensity, Alvart's film is increasingly worn down).

Suchsland then wrote that pretty much everything was blown, which is partly due to the template: A typical postmodern story that never aimed to depict reality.

Moritz Bleibtreu, Jasna Fritzi Bauer, Lars Eidinger and Fahri Yardim were praised as "brilliant actors".

[14] Oliver Kube wrote an article for the newspaper “Bild” in which he claims that German horror movies tend to “go wrong”.

Cut off is described as "tough Thriller", in which an "extremely dark" and intense atmosphere, which is usually only known from Hollywood movies such as Seven, is created by director Alvart.

To draw a conclusion, one could say that Cut Off is “a complex story, filled with absurd turns and an atmosphere that is usually only known from big-budget thrillers made in Hollywood.