Full Moon (1998) User Reviews

Too much

[Rene-6 · 7/10 · 18 April 1999]

Very good for a Swiss Movie, but Freddy Murer tries to put too many elements in this movie. Everything about Switzerland has to be shown : a racist, rich people, fake, solitary, all languages. This gives a very general picture about Swiss culture. The problem in the film is that the mixture of reality and mystery in Twin Peaks style seems much too artificial. Some scenes are only silly, e.g. the ritual with glass moving.

However, nice try and worth to see anyway.

Embarrassing stuff.

[Pedro-37 · 1/10 · 8 July 2002]

Fredi Murer is a good film maker - as proved with "Höhenfeuer". But his thriller/satire/drama "Vollmond" is a misfire of epic proportions. It's so utterly bad that some misguided intellectuals & artists actually found it good and defended the movie because "it has something to say". I know, it's hard to believe.

The story itself is not that bad. It deals with children that suddenly disappear. Why not build some X-Files-kind of story out of this? No, Murer goes the path of a morality play. What morality? I don't know. Probably that children are better people than grown-ups. And there's more. Murer tries to give a full-fledged picture of contemporary Switzerland. Meaning: He puts *every* topic that concerns the society into the film. Racism, single-parent-families, conflict old/young, religion, sects, materialism - the list is endless. As if that wouldn't be bad enough, it's the way he puts the topics in that is most insulting: People would talk and suddenly spout their views on something completely unrelated. Everything comes utterly unmotivated.

And it's long. The Swiss-cut was 150 dreadful minutes, the international release was around 2 hours. Both way too long. Murer should have really hired a good editor. Remember those DVD-commentaries or film school or whatever where people tell you that if a scene doesn't forward the story, you normally cut it out for pacing reason? Not Murer. There are dozens of pointless scenes in "Vollmond". A man walks on a street. Cut. A man walks on a retaining wall. Cut. Nothing happens.

And the esotericism and pretentious symbolism. The most primitive component of the film. Examples: Blind people see more than seeing people. Children put their hands on their eyes and see "more". There's wood laying around on every corner. It's impossible to tell what Murer wants to say with it - I had to read that this actually symbolized the Arche Noah. The movie is full of stuff like that.

And finally the acting. Terrible. The main child actor was utterly annoying. The old rich guy was plain bad. And the final scene in the TV-studio is the culmination of embarrassment. Bad acting meets hammy storytelling. Really, who could see something good in this? Who would say that Murer's cheap and pretentious symbolism "means" something or is "deep". Not deep. Shallow. Utterly. And bad. Avoid!

rating: 1/10

Fantasy versus logic

[hasosch · 10/10 · 1 April 2009]

I do not think that Fredi Murer's "Vollmond" is such a bad movie as the almost thoroughly negative critics may suggest. After all: Murer breaks here with the Swiss tradition of the combination of realism plus wonders and creates a style that turns it around into something like a magical realism, which is highly underrepresented also in international movies.

After the 12 children disappear in a full-moon-night, chief-inspector Wasser and his collaborators from the criminal police in Zurich seek to scoop out every little hint by applying logic. However, they soon realize that with logic alone, they do not get too far. (Note: It is not by chance that Wittgenstein wrote that logic is a system of trivialities. By aid of logic alone, it is impossible to transcend logic.) So, Wasser decides to get additional information from the parents of the missing children which he visits. His desolate result is that they share nothing with one another except that they all live near water. (Later, he will realize that he shares this feature, too, since "Wasser" is water in German.) This is the stadium of logic, enriched by semiotics. Although this term is not used in the movie (logic is, many times), we can recognize its existence very well when Mrs. Escher describes solely from her dream the looks of every of the 12 disappeared children with most high precision. And it is also exactly at this point, when chief-inspector Wasser realizes that logic must be abandoned fully for semiotics. Semiotics, in the movie, stands for fantasy against conclusions, for self-liberating out of system of trivialities and turning around in circles. From this point on, Murer's movie is even an attack against logic. Wasser gives now up his job and organizes a meeting of the parents of all children which is broadcast by TV. What we witness here, has been called silliness. However, it is the fantasy that breaks out now, released from the cuffs of logic. Although none of the parents have any concrete information about what happened to their children, they accuse one another of being bad parents, they ask one another for divorce, get hysterical before turned on camera, invent apocalyptic downfall-scenarios and other nice things more. But how far do they get with fantasy alone? The 13th child, "OMM", appears with a smile on his cheeks, and suddenly the parents see their children. Unable to differentiate between dream and reality, the camera operators pretend that somebody has smuggled a picture into the camera. But the parents have not passed their exam, and when the ultimatum is over, 12 times 12 children have disappeared during Full Moon.