Love Hurts. So Does Watching This Movie.
There’s a thin line between gothic romance and gothic nonsense — and The Forbidden Girl (2013) pole-vaults over it, doing a somersault of self-importance on the way down. Directed by Till Hastreiter (who I can only assume made this film on a dare from a bored demon), this German horror import promises dark mystery, sensual witchcraft, and psychological torment. What it delivers instead is 106 minutes of fog machines, nonsense dialogue, and the cinematic energy of a NyQuil commercial.
This movie feels like someone adapted a perfume commercial into a feature-length existential crisis. It’s moody, sexy, and completely hollow — like a vampire who never got the memo about actually drinking blood.
The Plot (Allegedly)
We open with Toby McClift (Peter Gadiot), a young man whose father is a preacher who has two parenting philosophies: 1) Don’t have fun, and 2) Love is evil. Naturally, Toby does the one thing guaranteed to piss off both God and his dad — he falls in love with Katie (Jytte-Merle Böhrnsen), a girl so sweet she practically glows. They plan a romantic date in a cemetery, because nothing says “eternal love” like tombstones and mildew.
Before the boy can get his first gothic kiss, a demon swoops in, kidnaps Katie, and leaves Toby screaming into the night. It’s the kind of opening that could’ve set up a tragic, haunting love story. Instead, it sets up a long, confusing therapy session that never ends.
After the incident, Toby tells everyone a demon did it, which — shocker — gets him institutionalized. Apparently, in this movie’s world, seeing your girlfriend dragged into Hell gets you a straightjacket instead of a priest. Six years later, Toby gets out of the asylum and immediately lands a job as a tutor at a creepy old castle. Because, sure, who doesn’t hire emotionally unstable men with trauma histories to teach children in remote estates?
The Castle of Clichés
The castle is straight out of “Discount Dracula’s Real Estate Listings.” Every room is dimly lit, everyone whispers cryptic things, and the only thing older than the furniture is the script. Toby meets his new employer, Lady Wallace (Jeanette Hain), who has the unsettling energy of someone who drinks the tears of orphans to keep her skin smooth.
He’s there to teach Laura — who, surprise! — looks exactly like his lost love, Katie. She’s also played by Böhrnsen, doing double duty as both “innocent ingenue” and “questionably supernatural femme fatale.” This dual role should be fascinating, but the film gives her so little to work with that she ends up playing both characters like she’s reading from a gothic IKEA manual.
There’s also a butler named Mortimer (Klaus Tange), who is the cinematic equivalent of a tax audit — long, slow, and filled with dread. Mortimer skulks around the castle like he’s auditioning for a Tim Burton movie that never got made, while occasionally saying things like “The Mistress must rest now” in a tone that suggests he really needs a vacation.
The Horror: Mostly Missing
Despite the setup — witches, demons, eternal youth — there’s very little actual horror. Instead, we get long, ponderous scenes of Toby wandering the castle looking confused, which is also a perfect metaphor for the audience experience.
The few attempts at scares are hilariously awkward. Toby experiences “visions” that look like deleted footage from a haunted mattress commercial: a hand here, a flicker there, maybe a lady screaming in soft focus. You know a horror film is in trouble when the scariest thing on-screen is the wallpaper pattern.
The cinematography tries hard to be artsy — lots of symmetrical shots, mirrors, and mist — but it all feels like a student film that spent too much time studying Kubrick and not enough studying pacing. If I wanted to watch beautiful lighting with no point, I’d stare at a chandelier.
The Forbidden Acting
Peter Gadiot, bless his cheekbones, spends most of the film looking either mildly constipated or deeply confused. To be fair, that’s probably how the script made him feel. His character arc consists of three emotions: love, guilt, and “What’s going on again?”
Jytte-Merle Böhrnsen tries her best as Laura/Katie, but her performance is buried under layers of melodramatic dialogue like, “Do you believe in destiny… or damnation?” delivered with the conviction of someone ordering a salad. She’s supposed to be a witch, but mostly she just looks cold.
Jeanette Hain’s Lady Wallace deserves her own award for keeping a straight face through lines like, “The youth must be harvested.” She’s clearly having fun being creepy, but the film never decides if she’s the villain, the victim, or just the world’s most dedicated moisturizer enthusiast.
And then there’s the dialogue. Oh, the dialogue. It’s like every sentence was translated from German into English by a haunted thesaurus. People don’t talk so much as they deliver philosophical TED Talks about love, sin, and immortality — usually while staring dramatically into the middle distance.
The Themes: Love, Death, and Nonsense
At its core, The Forbidden Girl wants to explore the danger of forbidden love — a classic gothic trope. But instead of passion or tragedy, we get long, cryptic speeches about “pure souls” and “eternal youth,” which sound profound until you realize they don’t actually mean anything.
The film flirts with religious imagery — a preacher father, an exorcism scene, and more crucifixes than a vampire’s panic room — but never commits to any theology beyond “sin is bad, but cleavage is good.” Toby’s attempted exorcism is a highlight, if only because it’s the most unintentionally hilarious scene in the film. Picture a man waving a cross while yelling, “Begone, foul witch!” only to immediately fail and get scolded by the person he was trying to save.
It’s less The Exorcist and more The Awkwardist.
The Pace: Slower Than Undead Molasses
At 106 minutes, The Forbidden Girl somehow feels like three hours. The story unfolds with all the urgency of a gothic snail. Scenes that should take thirty seconds — opening a door, finding a clue — stretch into eternity, padded with lingering shots of Toby looking confused by basic architecture.
There are so many shots of people walking through corridors that I started rooting for the wallpaper to develop a personality. The editing rhythm suggests the movie is trying to hypnotize you — and honestly, it almost worked.
The Ending: The Witch Is (Still) Not Dead
The finale tries to tie everything together — the witchcraft, the eternal youth, the tragic love story — but instead collapses into incoherence. Toby confronts Laura, who reveals she is the witch and needs his purity to stay young. (Pro tip: if you’re going to steal someone’s life force, at least explain it in fewer than eight monologues.)
By the time the credits rolled, I wasn’t sure if Toby was dead, possessed, or just tired of being in the movie. Same, Toby. Same.
Final Thoughts: “The Forbidden Girl” — A Cautionary Tale for the Patient Viewer
There’s a good film hiding somewhere inside The Forbidden Girl — buried under layers of fog, pretension, and German-English dialogue that sounds like a Ouija board gone rogue. It wants to be gothic, erotic, and tragic, but ends up being mostly confusing, inert, and unintentionally funny.
If you’re looking for a slow-burn romantic horror with deep atmosphere and gorgeous imagery, you’ll find prettier ones in Crimson Peak. If you’re looking for a film where people whisper ominously about love while nothing happens for two hours, congratulations — your cursed gem has arrived.
Verdict: ★★☆☆☆
The Forbidden Girl is a horror movie that’s afraid to get its hands dirty. It’s beautiful but empty, sensual but sterile — the cinematic equivalent of being seduced by a mannequin that quotes Nietzsche.
It’s called The Forbidden Girl because watching it feels like something you shouldn’t be allowed to do twice.
