When Your Existential Crisis Looks Like a Gremlin
The Nightmare (Der Nachtmahr) wants you to believe it’s profound. It wants to haunt your subconscious, whisper about guilt and repression, and maybe make you Google “German avant-garde symbolism explained for idiots.” What it actually does is trap you in a 90-minute fever dream about a teenage girl and her psychic connection with a wrinkled, rubber-skinned fetus gremlin that looks like Gollum if he’d been microwaved.
Directed by Achim Bornhak, the film feels like a lost collaboration between David Lynch and the world’s most pretentious EDM DJ. Bornhak throws together strobe lights, techno beats, and philosophical nonsense with the energy of someone trying to distract you from realizing there’s no story here.
The title comes from Henry Fuseli’s famous painting The Nightmare—a masterwork of 18th-century psychological horror. The movie, however, has as much in common with Fuseli as a rave does with the Mona Lisa.
Tina and Her Emotionally Supportive Homunculus
Our heroine is 17-year-old Tina (Carolyn Genzkow), a walking anxiety attack wrapped in neon lighting. One night, after a Berlin pool party that seems sponsored by Red Bull and bad decisions, she encounters a bizarre creature in the woods. Moments later, she’s hit by a car, wakes up unharmed, and starts seeing the monster everywhere—especially in her kitchen, eating leftovers like a judgmental roommate.
At first, Tina reacts the way any sane person would—she screams and calls security. But instead of, say, moving out or burning the house down, she eventually decides to bond with it. Her therapist, clearly licensed by the School of Terrible Ideas, tells her to “approach and touch the creature.” She does, and voilà! They’re psychically linked. If the creature stubs its toe, she feels it. If it gets tranquilized, she collapses like a Jenga tower.
It’s basically E.T. if Elliott were a sleep-deprived club kid and the alien looked like a taxidermy experiment gone rogue.
The Creature: Guilt, Trauma, or Just a Poorly Lit Puppet?
Ah, the creature—an animatronic baby demon that looks like it escaped from the world’s saddest Jim Henson workshop. The film wants it to represent Tina’s repressed self, or her guilt, or maybe her id, or maybe Germany’s collective fear of carbs. It’s never really clear.
Bornhak insists on making it “mysterious,” which mostly means he keeps cutting between Tina’s sweaty close-ups and the monster eating bananas in the dark. Sometimes it’s pitiful. Sometimes it’s grotesque. Sometimes it looks like a shriveled beanbag chair with teeth.
Yet, oddly, it’s the most compelling character in the film. Unlike everyone else, the creature doesn’t try to be cool or ironic. It just exists—hungry, lonely, and probably wishing it had wandered into a better movie.
Kim Gordon, for No Apparent Reason
Yes, that Kim Gordon. The bassist from Sonic Youth. She shows up as an English teacher, delivering a brief, deadpan monologue about poetry and perception. She’s in the film for about ninety seconds, but those ninety seconds are more lucid than everything else combined.
It’s as if Bornhak summoned her purely for indie cred—like sprinkling artisanal salt on a microwaved burrito. Gordon delivers her lines with the same detached coolness that defined her music career, then wisely disappears before the creature starts throwing furniture again.
Berlin: The Real Star of the Film
If there’s one thing The Nightmare nails, it’s the atmosphere. Neon lights pulse through the city like a migraine. The soundtrack hums with relentless bass, turning every scene into a rave for people who hate themselves. Berlin here feels like a living organism—beautiful, hollow, and perpetually sweating.
But Bornhak’s visual style quickly becomes exhausting. Every frame screams, “Look, I went to film school!”—mirror shots, blinking lights, distorted lenses, you name it. It’s art-house horror by way of Instagram filters. By the halfway point, you’re less scared and more in need of Advil.
Parents and Other Monsters
Tina’s parents are the kind of people who think locking their daughter in her room will cure psychosis. They smile with that polite German horror-movie detachment, equal parts concerned and mildly annoyed that their child might be possessed by performance art.
When they finally discover the creature sleeping in her bed, they react less like people who just found an alien and more like suburban homeowners finding mold. Their solution? Call animal control. Because yes, surely the local dogcatcher can handle a telepathic demon embryo.
Later, when they lob a sculpture at it during a party, you realize the true nightmare isn’t the creature—it’s bad parenting and worse dialogue.
A Party to End All Logic
In the climax, Tina breaks her creature buddy out of the hospital (because nothing says “mental stability” like stealing a tranquilized homunculus), drives to a party, and makes out with the guy she’s been crushing on. Then everyone sees the monster, panic ensues, and her parents show up to assault it with decorative art.
The scene is loud, chaotic, and deeply stupid. It’s supposed to be cathartic—Tina embracing her inner freak, rejecting social norms, blah blah blah—but it mostly feels like watching a toddler’s birthday party where someone spiked the punch with LSD.
The film ends with Tina waking up in a car driven by the creature, which, depending on your patience, is either symbolic liberation or a metaphor for drunk driving. They drive into the sunrise, and you’re left wondering if you’ve just witnessed an empowering metaphor or a nervous breakdown in cinematic form.
Symbolism and Other Headaches
Fans of arthouse horror will tell you that The Nightmare is a profound exploration of adolescent trauma and female identity. Maybe. But it’s hard to meditate on symbolism when you’re distracted by how absurd everything looks.
The creature is supposedly a manifestation of Tina’s guilt and repressed desires—except it also eats spaghetti, gets arrested, and drives cars. Which kind of kills the metaphor. It’s hard to feel enlightened when your subconscious looks like a rubber fetus with a learner’s permit.
Bornhak sprinkles in psychological jargon, flashes of religious imagery, and enough Freud to make your psych professor roll his eyes. But none of it adds up. It’s just noise—loud, stylish, and empty.
The Horror That Never Arrives
For a movie called The Nightmare, it’s surprisingly dull. There’s no suspense, no creeping dread—just confusion and strobe lights. It’s psychological horror in theory, but in practice it’s more of a 90-minute anxiety playlist.
The film wants to disturb you, but instead it lulls you into a strange stupor. You keep expecting something terrifying to happen—a shocking twist, a revelation, anything—but what you get instead is Tina whispering to her monster like a goth Pokémon trainer.
Final Diagnosis: Pretentious Monster Syndrome
The Nightmare tries to be bold, visionary, and transgressive. It ends up being a metaphor for itself—alienating, self-indulgent, and oddly endearing in its confusion. It’s what happens when an art student watches Donnie Darko and decides to make it “more European.”
To its credit, the film does look good—moody lighting, eerie sound design, and a strangely hypnotic pace. But that only makes its lack of emotional payoff more frustrating. It promises a deep dive into the psyche and instead delivers a kiddie pool full of pseudo-Freudian bubbles.
When the credits finally roll, you’ll feel like you’ve survived something—though it’s unclear whether that something is trauma, enlightenment, or just another bad night at a Berlin club.
Verdict: 2 out of 5 stars.
One for the atmosphere, one for Kim Gordon, and zero for coherence.
