Review of Berlin Syndrome

It looks every bit like the clichéd woman-held-captive movie, but there's nothing clichéd about it that I could see. I don't know how you make a fresh movie using an old plot line, but they did it. The characters were a bit flat, but they surprised me at almost every turn, and I loved that there were only two scenes where I face- palmed with frustration (I normally end up doing that a whole lot watching this kind of movie). Can't really give examples of what I mean so as to keep this spoiler-free, which is a bummer, but take my word for it if you will and give it a shot.

Oh and be warned: There's quite a bit of German dialogue.

Edit: The filmmakers should have done their linguistic research better. Andi forgets the word "contemplate" in English twice, and says "complicate" (the first time) and "compensate" (the second time) instead. Apart from the fact that it's a fairly unlikely mistake for an English teacher to make, it's pretty much impossible for a native speaker of German. You see, "complicate" and "compensate" both have cognates in German, "(ver)komplizieren" and "kompensieren" respectively. They're not even false cognates like the German "lernen" and English "learn", where "lernen" also corresponds to "study", leading non-fluent German speakers to say stuff like "I have learned at Cambridge for two years". So even if Andi could forget how to say "contemplate" in English, he wouldn't have confused it with words that are almost identical in German.

There you have it. Phew. Glad we could sort this out.