Kritiken

For its first half, In the Basement is a brisk, bracing, and often very funny film about the seeds of fascism in contemporary Austrian society. The people Seidl observes in his short, sketchlike sequences are generally obsessed with order and domination, yet he renders their obsession nonthreatening, if not comically pathetic, by presenting them like characters in a comic strip, centering each of them in symmetrical or near-symmetrical compositions with lots of negative space at the top.

In both the specificity of his conception and the fastidiousness of his execution, with every mounted ibex and spanking bench seemingly arranged to present the desired flattened perspective, Seidl is as bound to his gimlet-eyed style as his subjects are to their obsessions. It isn't the same thing as perfection, but by now Seidl has refined and delimited his approach to such a point that he cannot make a mistake.

Ulrich Seidl's raw portrayals of ordinary people have been criticized as unflattering and wallowing in abjection. But occasionally, as in his newest, "In the Basement," the director can make you wonder whether the problem doesn't lie with his films but with everyone else's. This often hilarious movie descends into the unseen spaces of Austrian homes — literally and figuratively — and creates a stage for their residents' fantasies of sex, violence and power.

...Seidl appeared to move away from this tendency with humanistic efforts like Jesus, You Know and Import Export, but now he's returned full force: most of the last half of In the Basement is predictably and dully devoted to the dungeons of S&M enthusiasts, all presented as possessing interchangeable identities as well as predilections.

In Ulrich Seidl's latest, the unconscious is an actual place only for the sake of cinematic expediency, rendered filmable through the figure of the basement, that lowest and most foundational level of one's home. Here lies the contradiction and the conceptual genius of In the Basement, which surveys the unspeakable things we do, and the unavowable creatures we allow ourselves to become, when there's nobody looking.

Seidl manages to create a propelling tension between subject matter and structure. Symmetry, often two-shots, diminishes the uniqueness of each character. On the other hand, everyone in the film freely actualizes his or her own individuality. This set-up is not easily resolved, nor need it be. It is a clever ploy to extract the dynamic from the static. You could say he brings to life those otherwise marked for their particular forms of solitude.

Seidl adopts his standardised clinical approach and despite the sombreness of the film's subject-matter there are plenty of humorous moments that lighten the sharp and intentionally clinical colour of his digital images. Not unlike his previous films, Seidl explores the lives of individuals so as to communicate scepticism with respect to the broader socio-political reality in Europe.

Little to no background is given on the subjects outside of their subterranean pursuits, and the doc is most effective when it allows this lack of context to send our imaginations reeling.

The mise en scène in In the Basement, as in all Seidl's films, is literal—the glorious and sometimes frightening spectacle of humanity has been scenographied, dramatized, ordered for the camera which records it, frontally, stilted. Seidl never shows the convention of the world, but rather imposing his conceptual vision on the world, a world not so much stylized as conceived from a true Weltanschauung, raw and dark as it may be.

With In the Basement, Ulrich Seidl's signature tableaux vivants align with the Surrealist penchant for capturing the enchanting idiosyncrasies and unexpectedly productive idiocies of ordinary life.

Grabby and grubby in equal measure, this meticulously composed trawl through the contents of several middle-class Austrians' cellars (a space, according to Seidl, that his countrymen traditionally give over to their most personal hobbies) yields more than a few startling discoveries... [In the Basement] is by turns uproarious, repulsive and oddly touching.

Seidl is careful to juxtapose the super freaky with the utterly mundane. To give anything more away at this point would be to lessen the film's impact. Suffice to say, we'll never look at Toys 'R' Us in quite the same way again.