I'm fairly fluent in German, and yet I had trouble following the dialogue and action in this low-budget German-language teleplay. (Admittedly, the sound recording is poor and the plot of this story is intentionally disorienting.) I wouldn't have been able to understand it at all, if not for the fact that I had previously read the English-language story (by Conrad Aiken) from which this spooky teleplay is adapted.
The German teleplay 'Mr Arcularis' was videotaped on an extremely low budget. The credits list only the actors who have speaking roles, and don't identify which actors play which roles. All of these German actors are unknown to me; I have no idea which one was cast in the central role of Herr Arcularis.
SPOILERS AHEAD. In the opening scene, Arcularis is extremely ill with a severe heart condition; his only hope of survival is a very risky surgical procedure. Miraculously, the surgery goes very well, and Arcularis decides to recuperate by going on a sea voyage. However, the passengers and crew aboard the ship are strangely similar to the medical staff he encountered in hospital.
Right here, I had a problem. In some ways, this very moody drama reminded me of the Twilight Zone episode 'Shadow Play'. In that classic episode, a man finds himself reliving the same grim experience over and over, encountering the same people each time ... but the various people keep exchanging roles in the repeating drama. 'Mr Arcularis' was staged on an extremely low budget ... so, when I recognised the actors in the shipboard sequences as the same actors I'd previously seen in the hospital sequence, I assumed that this was down to the low production budget requiring the same actors to double and treble on roles. Even though I'd previously read Aiken's original story, I was disoriented -- in a bad way -- by the device of the repeating actors here.
Various people aboard the ship accuse Arcularis of sleepwalking: they claim to have seen him wandering the decks at night. He has no memory of this. It develops that there is a sealed coffin aboard the ship, and someone has attempted to open it: the captain formally accuses Arcularis. Eventually, Arcularis must come to terms with his unresolved anger towards his dead mother. At the end, it develops that Arcularis isn't aboard a ship after all: he died in hospital during the surgery.
A serious flaw in Aiken's original story, as well as in this adaptation, is that it cribs heavily from two better-known fantasies: Sutton Vane's play 'Outward Bound' (in which strangers aboard a fogbound ocean liner discover they are dead, and bound for the afterworld) and Ambrose Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' (in which a man narrowly escapes death, but then turns out not to have escaped after all). Sir William Golding took the premise of 'Owl Creek Bridge' and attempted to extend it to book length in his novel 'Pincher Martin', with only semi-successful results. The one real merit that Aiken brings to this material is that the protagonist must resolve a problem from his past before making the transition from life to death.
The extremely low budget of this tele-version is not entirely a drawback. The dim lighting and the confined sets create an atmosphere of stark, moody claustrophobia ... entirely suitable to the subject matter. The German actors, with their culture's acting techniques, bring a fatalistic air to the proceedings that might have been absent had this production been attempted by British or American actors. I found this production extremely creepy, and -- considering that this is a horror story -- that certainly means it succeeded. I'll rate 'Mr Arcularis' 9 out of 10, and I'd like to see more work by director Fritz Umgelter.
The German teleplay 'Mr Arcularis' was videotaped on an extremely low budget. The credits list only the actors who have speaking roles, and don't identify which actors play which roles. All of these German actors are unknown to me; I have no idea which one was cast in the central role of Herr Arcularis.
SPOILERS AHEAD. In the opening scene, Arcularis is extremely ill with a severe heart condition; his only hope of survival is a very risky surgical procedure. Miraculously, the surgery goes very well, and Arcularis decides to recuperate by going on a sea voyage. However, the passengers and crew aboard the ship are strangely similar to the medical staff he encountered in hospital.
Right here, I had a problem. In some ways, this very moody drama reminded me of the Twilight Zone episode 'Shadow Play'. In that classic episode, a man finds himself reliving the same grim experience over and over, encountering the same people each time ... but the various people keep exchanging roles in the repeating drama. 'Mr Arcularis' was staged on an extremely low budget ... so, when I recognised the actors in the shipboard sequences as the same actors I'd previously seen in the hospital sequence, I assumed that this was down to the low production budget requiring the same actors to double and treble on roles. Even though I'd previously read Aiken's original story, I was disoriented -- in a bad way -- by the device of the repeating actors here.
Various people aboard the ship accuse Arcularis of sleepwalking: they claim to have seen him wandering the decks at night. He has no memory of this. It develops that there is a sealed coffin aboard the ship, and someone has attempted to open it: the captain formally accuses Arcularis. Eventually, Arcularis must come to terms with his unresolved anger towards his dead mother. At the end, it develops that Arcularis isn't aboard a ship after all: he died in hospital during the surgery.
A serious flaw in Aiken's original story, as well as in this adaptation, is that it cribs heavily from two better-known fantasies: Sutton Vane's play 'Outward Bound' (in which strangers aboard a fogbound ocean liner discover they are dead, and bound for the afterworld) and Ambrose Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' (in which a man narrowly escapes death, but then turns out not to have escaped after all). Sir William Golding took the premise of 'Owl Creek Bridge' and attempted to extend it to book length in his novel 'Pincher Martin', with only semi-successful results. The one real merit that Aiken brings to this material is that the protagonist must resolve a problem from his past before making the transition from life to death.
The extremely low budget of this tele-version is not entirely a drawback. The dim lighting and the confined sets create an atmosphere of stark, moody claustrophobia ... entirely suitable to the subject matter. The German actors, with their culture's acting techniques, bring a fatalistic air to the proceedings that might have been absent had this production been attempted by British or American actors. I found this production extremely creepy, and -- considering that this is a horror story -- that certainly means it succeeded. I'll rate 'Mr Arcularis' 9 out of 10, and I'd like to see more work by director Fritz Umgelter.
