"The Summer House" is a subtle portrait of human desire, inner desolation, self-deception and moral decadence.
A film moving slowly, but ceaselessly to a final cataclysm".
The Larsens are a picture perfect family from the German upper-middle class. They have everything that means comfort and should mean happiness: Business success, a stylish, light-flooded home and a full scholarship for their daughter to study in England. However, the head of the family, Markus, an architect, lives a secret, bisexual double life as his wife Christine and their eleven-year-old daughter Elisabeth drown in unendurable loneliness.
Markus realizes that he has a strong yearning for one of his daughter's school friends, Johannes, 12, also the son of his tax penality-bedeviled business partner, Christopher. He succeeds in getting closer to Johannes and binds the boy to himself with ever-increasing intensity.
His wife is desperately aware of the emotional distance of her husband, but only her daughter Elizabeth, reacting to the sexually laden atmosphere, sees through the lies and secrets that she instinctively knows to be an growing, disruptive threat to the entire family.
As Markus loses control of the situation and in a final moment of strength, pushes Johannes away, the action nevertheless moves them all remorselessly into the abyss.
Festivals:
Achtung Berlin - New Berlin Film Award - Berlin Highlights 2014
Montreal World Film Festival - Competition - 2014
LGBT Film Festival Warsaw, Poland - Opening Film - 2015
Review:
'Subtlety, complex characters, enormous tension, a clever psychology and great actors distinguish the very remarkable German drama 'The Summer House' by Curtis Burz.'
Kisten Liese
FIPRESCI Jury, Montreal World Film Festival 2014
“The Summer House” is a subtle view of human desires, but also inner desolation, self-deception and moral decay. A film that slowly but inexorably nears the abyss. It gets under the skin, and, where we would avert our gaze, it cannot. And it should not.
Karsten Kastelan
Association of the German Film Critics
