Critics reviews

And perhaps this unabashed discomfort, with Huppert’s anguish and a refusal by Schroeter to confirm or conform to anything beyond a raw ganglion of emotional misanthropy, is what makes his version of Malina seem more a visual castigation than the more immersive experience of reading Bachmann’s stream of consciousness prose...

A searing and serrated adaptation of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 cult novel.

With its musical cadences and its mise en scène of ornate mirrors and consuming fires, Schroeter’s Malina transforms Bachman’s literary text into an idiosyncratic spectacle and aural feast.

Schroeter's first film from another source was attacked by feminist critics who felt he had betrayed the book by, according to a leading German feminist writer, Alice Schwarzer, "trivialising sexual violence". But Schroeter, never interested in the world outside the one of his imagination, remained true to himself by seeing the character, known only as The Woman, as the embodiment of all desire or as the mimetic ideal.

In one of the rare truly visual films about writers, the director Werner Schroeter generates extravagant images to match the insights of the nameless writer he films—played with ferocious precision by Isabelle Huppert and dubbed into German by the early Wim Wenders muse Lisa Kreuzer.

Through Elfriede Jelenik’s screenplay, Schroeter does not attempt to simply transpose the words on the page to the screen, but through camera, framing, editing and performance engages in a cinematic interpretation of the novel.

"Malina,"... is a handsomely photographed and well-acted film. But it is also terribly tedious. More than two hours long, it lacks a conventional narrative structure, and its symbolism, much of it heavily Freudian, is often pretentious and needlessly redundant.