Kritiken

Ade's strategies are aimed at getting as close to this character as possible, and the film has a wonderful, magical ending which I choose to read as a ray of hope for her. It is audacious and open, a mystery, and it announces an important career.

The origins of discomfort and awkwardness in Maren Ade's Everyone Else and Toni Erdmann can be traced back to her breezily brutal debut... Ill-equipped for such survival-of-the-fittest gauntlets, Melanie forces herself into social and work situations hoping to blend in. But predators of all ages can smell fear and she never stands a chance. The closing moments present her "fight" giving way to "flight" in particularly tragic fashion.

Compared to Everyone Else, much of the short, compact Forest appears one-note and perhaps even cruel, with each scene presenting yet another acute illustration of Melanie's grating interactions (e.g., a student hurling a chocolate-milk carton at her back). But Ade saves her grandest gesture for Forest's conclusion—a thoroughly moving, out-of-thin-air departure that exchanges the preceding brand of DV-rough realism for an entirely new, fantastical realm of subjectivity.

Eva Löbau gives a riveting performance as a lonely young schoolteacher in this wrenching German film. A very impressive first feature by Maren Ade... As the humiliations increase in number and severity, Melanie begins to fall apart and Löbau and Ade portray her slow-motion collapse with an effective combination of rigour and sympathy.