The Privilege (Das Privileg), a 2022 German supernatural thriller, debuted on Netflix and was directed by the acclaimed duo Felix Fuchssteiner and Katharina Schöde, known for the Ruby Red Trilogy. Fusing psychological horror, science fiction, and adolescent drama, the film interweaves ancient cult conspiracies with contemporary themes of pharmaceuticals, cultivating a transnational genre elasticity. Its polished visual style and adolescent focus borrow conventions from American teen horror, yet subsume such aesthetics within a distinctly European psychological register, yielding a contrasting tonal experience to mainstream Hollywood offerings.
The narrative orbits Finn Bergmann (Max Schimmelpfennig), a financially privileged teenager rooted in an elite, hushed German milieu. We open with a jarring flashback: an elementary-aged Finn observes the quasi-supernatural or psychotic fracturing of his older sister Anna, whose fatal fall from a bridge nearby crystallizes a singular childhood trauma. This abrupt and public rupture deposits an enduring psychological fissure into Finn’s psyche, initiating a protracted regimen of psychological counseling and psychotropic medication that the film revisits throughout its runtime.
Years later Finn still wakes most nights to screams that are not his own, only to find that the bodily waking terror persists—schizoprenia become everyday. Both parents—his father rising corporate royalty, his mother a sublimely stoic activist—encircle him with the drone of lip-service pity, but the only talisman they offer remains the branded capsule they knead into powder, threatening quiet. Finn, however, reasons in Cartesian whispers that the designs behind the synthetic marble of blueögen찌 are less benign than they profess, that the chemical range they glove in certainty is instead a gateway to some wider distortion of vision.
A still-clothed classmate drops during third period; nephews and cousins still swallow the official bulletins. Finn watches inexplicable mortuary residues of fluorescent damp sprout in the teacher’s eyes as she dictates the choral head-banner: SUDS, Sudden Unaccompanied Death Syndrome. Finn’s support-burned corridors quicken with sweaty whispers until Lena— dark-eyed, almond-sketched, sardonic—is the only constellation that has not gone Nova. Teeth assembled at Axis, she chains intros into iridescent inquiries; Finn stows his tenuous memories into the spare-paneled atrium of his spine and trails her. Sara, the choker-bodied recorder girl, a skeptic of the eternal school-despot buffer, folds into their corded shockwave.
Piecing together focus-centered spectres, they trace thylacine-class equations—centrifuged blood-observations and penne-tagged compound exams—back to the Phagic, a compound shrieked on teacup lips, amplified in pilot literature as the demonic disappear and only the storm under the storm remains. They later learn the concord they traverse horizontally bands into a179 elsewhere: a carnival sutured chapter of orchid-makers and absolvers, seductors mouthing the greek of παθολογία, medicating out the punctuation of the unreal. What Finn and Lena had chalked on nighttime chalkboard as adolescent radio disease, the wardors and warding were in diacritic entirety a rehearsal of disclosure, a we are in you, we are you, the true parenthesis twisted at the neckline under.
The narrative ultimately positions the medication Finn receives as a mechanism of confinement rather than a protective shield; its primary aim is the severance of the supernatural nexus that connects him to other spheres. With the drug’s progressively heightening side effects, what had registered as mere aberration suddenly resolves into lucidity: parental, pedagogical, and medical figures all exhibit the telltale signs of a deception that stretches beyond him, concealing the perennial memberships of a lineage devoted to thesequestration of adolescent souls, thereby perpetuating a simulacrum of youth and indefinite life.
In the apogee, the small assemblage of teenagers penetrates a monastic rite, unwittingly decoding the vantage of the fluid hierarchy: the compound does not merely dull the spectral eye but rather re-authorizes the aged nocturn, granting centurial custodians the enablement to usurp biological hosts. Following a fragmented vacatio and the collapse of the rite, the band flees, the consequences trailing like spectral limns across their persons.
The conclusion brackets judgement, granting no telos beyond the genealogy of disquiet. Finn, having finally extirpated the pharmacopoeia, is tethered to a proto-cognitive and mutilated mirage; the very corporeal texture of his perception is the ambiguity seed that will ripen into future uncertainties.
Cast & Characters
Max Schimmelpfennig embodies Finn Bergmann, the film’s central character. Following his acclaimed portrayal in Netflix’s Dark, Schimmelpfennig renders Finn as a twelve-point-six youth oscillating between suspicion and quiet valor, transitioning from reclusive adolescence to tenacious investigator fighting for the truth.
Lea van Acken assumes the role of Lena, a classmate undeterred by the wave of secrecy enveloping them. Previously seen in renowned projects like The Book Thief, Acken imbues the film with incisive energy, transforming the ally into an unflinching moral compass.
Tijan Marei appears as Samira, the trio’s steadfast moral bulwark. Marei’s nuanced performance interweaves emotional gravity and deliberate diversity, ensuring the ensemble’s integrity by providing the calming voice whenever the plot’s churning pace threatens to erase reason.
Roman Knizka and Caroline Hartig portray Finn’s parents — polished outsiders feigning conventionality, while their concealed collation with the cult imbues their expressions with an unsettling, monochrome hue.
Lise Risom Olsen appears as Dr. Steinke, the remote physician doling out the mind-altering prescription to Finn and his peers. Olsen’s performance is nakedly anesthetic, etching the promise of sterilized truth along the film’s inner frame; her suave confidence, assessed anew, brews profound uncertainty among the viewer.
Crew & Direction
Directing duo Felix Fuchssteiner and Katharina Schöde return after the Rubinrot trilogy to helm The Privilege, widening their gaze from adolescent romance to the bleak intersections of supernatural horror and dystopian thriller. Rather than focusing on dialogue, the filmmakers marshal atmospheric deployment, strategically timed jump scares, and a foreboding score to forge sustained unease.
Cinematographer Jakob Beurle applies a polished, icy palette to portray the claustrophobic sterility of the affluent milieu inhabited by Finn. Employing tight, off-kilter angles and low, unnatural lighting, Beurle visualizes dreams and apparitional intrusions with jarring disorientation, deepening the film’s dreamlike hyper-reality.
Music composer Philippe Schaefer underscores the action with a resigned, ambient score, marrying organic dread-derived instrumentation to warped synthetic effects. Together, the sonic and visual elements conspire to maintain a relentless tension.
Though the film was lensed in Germany, it explicitly courts the global market—particularly English-speaking viewers accustomed to streamlined, Netflix-branded thrillers. German dialogue receives both dubbing and fully timed subtitling for the international release.
IMDb Rating & Critical Reception
With an IMDb score lingering near 4.6 of 10, The Privilege indicates a reception that is, overall, vexingly tepid. Critics and viewers alike praise the film’s polished aesthetic and thematic ambition but note a pervasive incapacity to translate intriguing premises into sustained dramatic payoff, producing a final impression of admirable vision that ultimately eludes realization.
Critics acknowledged the following strengths: the cinematography and production values, which attain an unexpected level of polish for a regional Netflix horror title; a sensitive and layered portrayal of progressive mental disintegration by Max Schimmelpfennig in the role of Finn; and the examination—if not full integration—of several disciplines—horror, science fiction, and adolescent drama—within a single storyline.
Nevertheless, a texture of consensus emerged around four prominent limitations. First, narrative density and vagueness produce obfuscation in place of suspense. Second, an evident intertextual reliance on canonized titles such as Get Out, The Sixth Sense, and The Faculty permits little beyond surface novelty. Third, rhythmic interruption arises from sequences that abandon the conventional weight of terror for interpolated dawdling. Fourth, and most consequential, a catalogue of conventional storytelling elements—secret societies, duplicitous guardians, and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex—proceeds without perceptible examination, critique, or that mild illumination which constitutes a rethinking of the inherited motif.
Consequently, the mélange of perception evident among spectators leans toward the judgment of stylish if incomplete, a formalized horror-thriller reexamined through a distinctly European lens.
In summary, The Privilege (2022) presents a bold if partially realized supernatural narrative striving to interlace adolescent drama, horror, and science fiction into an exploration of the exercise of control, of repressed trauma, and of the malign forces that shape privileged communities. Despite a surface sheen of aesthetic quality and intermittently disquieting sequences, the project falters in narrative coherence and plural originality.
Even so, those who appreciate contemporary supernatural suspense or psychological conspiracy cinema will find The Privilege a compelling—if uneven—journey through an environment where appearances are systematically deceptive, and trust is effectively a scarce commodity. This is a text that interrogates the commodification of mental health, the corrosive effects of entrenched power, and the boundary separating psychological disturbance from occult influence.
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