Critics reviews

The film is full of beatings—it practically begins with a series of sadistic rituals that Lommel's superiors perform on their new recruits—and it contains a few murders as well. Yet Fassbinder purposely drains the violence of suspense; it feels inevitable, ritualized, a cold fact of modern life.

Before making films, the prodigious and precocious Fassbinder founded a theatre troupe, and the coldly stylized, comically affectless performances are a mark of a singular sensibility. These performances, as well as his restrained, precise, yet highly textured and alluringly composed images, help to convert his starkly modern aesthetic into a world.

Formally, Love Is Colder Than Death blends the dynamic tracks and jarring cuts of the Nouvelle Vague with the arid, artificial performance style of RWF's own Anti-Theater. But the film is more than the sum of its appropriations. Unabashedly off-putting (like Fassbinder himself), it stakes out its creator's motifs and techniques, the latter changing with time but the former comprising the thesis to his career.

The grocery store is essential to the film's mission: it's something that could be mundane, but which Fassbinder very consciously chooses to mine for maximum strangeness. The looping camera movements offer a palpable contrast to earlier scenes in which the characters are presented in severe minimalist (yet equally stylized and defamiliarized) tableaus.

True to its title, Love Is Colder Than Death is an austere, monochromatic effort, unforgiving in its depiction of conflicted passions—between romance and rejection, certainly, but also the pleasurable and the occupational and the lengths we go to bridge such divides.

Shot on a pfennig budget, this - his first feature - is both an assured 'revolutionary' critique of genre, and at the same time a constantly searching experiment in style and treatment.

The film seems amateurish, with the feeling and look of a student’s first feature - perhaps not surprising since this was Fassbinder's feature debut. But while hard going, the film grows on you.

Narratively and experimentally, it’s neither exciting nor groundbreaking; since Fassbinder was still obviously trying to hone his signature Brechtian aesthetic, it may come as a surprise that the film echoes the French New Wave... than it does the cinema of Douglas Sirk.