"Aus der Haut" or "Shed My Skin" is a German television movie from March 2016, so by now this one isn't even a year old. It runs for slightly under 90 minutes just like German small screen releases do most of the time. The director is Stefan Schaller and I really loved his Kurnaz film. The writer is Jan Braren and he is mostly known for "Homevideo" by now. But lets take a look at this one here. It tells us the story of an adolescent who discovers that he may be a homosexual. A lot of the film feels as if it is much more about how everybody around him perceives this and not really about the character's inner state of mind. Or maybe the actor just wasn't good enough to portray it convincingly. We see his fellow students react to it, we see his parents, we see teachers and we even see other students' parents react. Merlin Rose has a fairly respectable body of work for his age, but still he did not really win me over. Same goes for the other younger actors in here who play mostly his classmates. It's all very generic and stereotypical and nothing too creative. The movie was better when Michelsen and von Bülow are on screen mostly and also when the film focuses on their relationship. These aspects are what kept me from giving the film an even lower rating as there was almost no quality to the core plot and it never became interesting or a film where you would really cheer for a character and care for his well-being. On the contrary: Almost everybody in here is unlikable, which is not a problem at all and does not define a bad movie, but you still have to make these flawed characters interesting and I don't think they really succeeded here. There are solid moments here and there, also one involving the son's teacher for example or a meeting with the parents, even if that one was also pretty stereotypical sadly. Oh yeah and Johannes Krisch was absolutely wasted in here. He is a much much better actor than what he showed us here. It wasn't his fault, but it was because of the material he had to work with in both quality and quantity. The ending is also not one that really makes up for everything before that. German film may not have improved as drastically as American when it comes to small screen releases, but still there are more than a handful pretty good television works out there from recent years. This is not one of them. I give it a thumbs-down and don't recommend the watch.
Review of Shed My Skin
