Four Windows

By: Scott Cranin
In-House Review - Apr 04 2013

Writer/director Christian Moris Müller divides his unique film into four chapters: Son, Daughter, Father and Mother. The film tells what happens to each of these family members during a single day in their lives.

The very hot Son says goodbye to the family, meets his buddies and then veers off alone to his favorite adult arcade. There, he has some steamy booth sex with a gruff man who refuses to kiss the tender lad. Blowing off a crucial exam, he revisits the place several times, seeking the man - to no avail. After this juicy start, Dad hires a hooker and some very odd things happen. Meanwhile, Mom is seducing the building's handyman for a kiss. But the Daughter's episode is the kicker: on the subway, she begs older men to fuck her.

The family is reunited at the end of the film to celebrate the Son's exam - of course they don't know that he didn't even take it, or what else they've each been doing. You must have gathered that this family is surely not the Cleavers.

Told entirely from inside the heads of these characters, you'll want to peer through these dirty windows.

By: MikeBogie

I was very disappointed in this movie. I found it boring and hard to follow the story. It was a struggle to stay awake while watching this film. Of course the fact that all the dialogue was in German didn't help in trying to keep track of what was going on. It also seemed to jump around a lot between the activities of the actors which also made it harder to follow.

By: Amos Lassen

"Four Windows"

German Angst

Amos Lassen

"Four Windows" is a German drama that looks at the family and the relationships therein. It is divided into four acts-one for each family member; mother (Margarita Broich), a high strung woman, father (Thorsten Merten), a man of uncertainly, son (Frank Droese), a sexually confused teen, and daughter (Theresa Scholze), an angry girl. Each of the family members has a secret and each cries for life. They can't live together and they can't exist apart.
Director Christian Moris Muller looks at what makes up the modern German family and what he finds is four people who each hold some kind of secret, each member of the family has his own face, each screams for life. They want to get away from each other but cannot live apart and so they hang on tightly. The more they are together, the more the atmosphere around them stays quiet. When the cracks in the family structure widen, a secret that is inescapable is exposed.
This is an unusual film in that it tends to polarize those that watch it because it offers so much for self-reflection. Each person who sees the film can interpret it differently and it is easy to integrate one's own experience into the film.
Even with no violence this is a brutal film but it looks at the that is around us everyday yet is in-explainable. The father is a man who once enjoyed life but he is now in a rut and cannot seem to find a way out. The mother is simply a mother and she realizes how little she knows her children. The son lives in his own world, dreams a lot and just does his own thing. The daughter has to live with the abuse of her father and she seems to have lost whatever direction she had in her life. Together they are a family that is not much of a family.
There is a great deal going on in the movie and the cast is excellent all around. We learn about what makes a family and the windows of the title remind us that the family is the sum of its parts.