A terrifying performance from nine-year-old German actor Helena Zengel is at the centre of this sombre drama from Nora Fingscheidt. She plays Benni, a violent, uncontrolled and near-feral problem kid who takes the social services to breaking point and beyond. At one stage, a strategic soundtrack use of Nina Simone’s track Ain’t Got No – I Got Life seems to suggest that we should sympathise with Benni as a tiny whirlwind force of nature who resists being crushed by drab authority.
But that’s not how this gruesome, compelling film is playing out. Most of the time, Benni is simply scary, a sociopath in training, quite unteachable and unreformable, horrible to the people trying to help her like the scorpion that stings the frog because that’s its nature. Benni has a charming streak that has seduced a number of social workers to make an emotional investment in her, to take risks for her, to go out on a limb for her, only for her to let them down and in a sense to consume them as eagerly and unrepentantly as a vampire. All the time, her dials are up to 11, screaming, laughing too loud, swearing, punching.
Her key social worker, Frau Bafané (Gabriela Maria Schmeide), tries to get Benni into special schools or facilities; dozens turn her down and Benni is too young to be effectively incarcerated as an inpatient. While Benni is eerily unaffected, the strain takes its toll on Bafané, reducing her to an emotional wreck, and the same is true of another social worker, Micha (Albrecht Schuch), a tough young guy who is no pushover, and who takes Benni away for a tough-love stay in his cabin in the woods.
It’s a trip that involves borderline-inappropriate intimacy with this intense child – a risk that appears not to have occurred to the entirely blameless Micha. And all the time, the stakes get higher and the morale lower. There are times, when Zengel is performing with other children, especially younger children, when you get the strange sense that this isn’t acting – it is actually happening. A grisly, gripping watch.
• System Crasher is available on Curzon Home Cinema from 27 March.
