A girl, from a conservative rural town in 1970s Germany, suffers from epilepsy and mental illness, but believe that she is possessed by devils; in the actual events on which 'Requiem' is based, she died after repeated exorcisms. If 'The Exorcist' comes immediately to mind (and there is one, short, truly distressing scene in this movie in which exorcism is indeed performed), the better comparison is perhaps with 'Breaking the Waves', although this movie is less strange and sexual than Lars von Trier's film. But it's also very good: it's superbly acted and never overplayed, while the world of recent past is depicted unspectacularly, but utterly convincingly, instead of the cheap references to popular culture that dominate most movies set in the 1970s, we see here a world like our own, only a little drained of colour. Perhaps the best tribute I can pay is to say that for a film with such an esoteric subject matter, it surprisingly, and chillingly, tells what feels like a universal story.
Review of Requiem
