Recensioni de* critic*

An intimate film that really draws in the viewer, In My Room presents an unusually lyrical take on the end of the world as we know it. Its melancholy undertones are there from the start, suggestive of a longstanding malaise, but Köhler invites us to believe that with or without us, the world will be alright.

“In My Room” [is] a small gem thanks to Köhler’s eye for small details. He’s a keen image-maker; Armin’s story also resonates thanks to Köhler’s ear for naturalistic dialogue and novelistic detail, both of which serve the movie’s episodic narrative... You have to want to spend time with the film, and just go wherever Köhler and his collaborators take you.

“In My Room” is a movie about emptiness, yet it clamors with ideas... Abetted by Patrick Orth’s careful, almost obsessively calm camerawork, Köhler has concocted an uncommonly subtle and deliberately ambiguous work, one that’s delicately rewarding, if you meet it halfway. By withholding any explanation for the mass disappearance, he forces us to grapple with far weightier issues.

[In My Room has] an unfulfilling, irresolute ending, and Köhler knows as much, for his movie is nothing if not drum-tight and wonderfully well thought through. And this will be enough for some; it’s just that, like Kirsi, I happen to believe there’s more out there.

[In My Room has] a pure Twilight Zone premise, except that here the uncanniness has been superimposed onto [a] low-key European character study, and the film declines to shift modes after Armin’s world turns upside down.

A wondrously wry and counterintuitive tale of postapocalyptic survival... “In My Room” is a mysterious and surprising movie about the frustration of the unseen and the poignancy of paths not taken... it’s also a reminder that low-key realism and rigorously imagined fantasy often make ideal bedfellows.

There are myriad pleasures in Köhler's film, not least the guessing game he makes the audience play about what kind of movie they're watching. Sci-fi? Comedy? Horror? Drama? The smattering of all of the above slowly gives way to an deliberate purgatorial holding pattern... [In My Room] is a film that's almost a lot of things and blissfully itself.

Playful and fun (which I can’t say of the other two films by Köhler I’ve seen, the purposefully-but-still drab Bungalow and Sleeping Sickness), full of surprise song cues, its deceptively drab opening segment full of information unexpectedly crucial to what’s about to follow, the whole appropriately despairing about heterosexual relationships.

The studied banality of Kohler’s approach—no score, undramatic lighting, very few close-ups—combined with Armin’s essential diffidence generates a subtle underlying air of suspense, a suspicion that the narrative could feasibly could go anywhere from the seeming impasse at which it begins. It turns out that this is by design, since the ensuing plot gambit is meant to be received as a shock to the system.

In My Room’s most remarkable and bracing feat with respect to temporality is really just the transformation in Armin himself. . . . No matter how much time has passed, In My Room invests Armin with an almost comical level of capability when the chips are down.

Köhler devotes the same attention to nuance and detail to each of the genres he riffs on, whether character study, post-apocalyptic drama, or love story, and moves between them with consummate ease, while injecting enough openness into their respective scenarios such that several, equally intriguing interpretations are always possible.

A film of meticulous details and sly, subtle ironies, In My Room infuses its high concept with a touching spirit of genuine inquiry. Its central scenario is by now exceedingly familiar from science fiction and pop culture, but it takes a director of Köhler’s skills and temperament to maximize its potential as a philosophical thought experiment.