The Vow (2007 TV Movie) User Reviews

images of a meeting

[Vincentiu · 13 August 2012]

a writer. a nun. a village. and seeds of religious visions. sweet atmosphere, poetic parts, cruel pieces and history of a meeting in sauce of first XIX -th century period. result - a difficult exercise. because the risks are many. because the speech is ambiguous. because the trap is a subjective lesson . it is a beautiful film. but far from courage. delicate picture of a time, it is only dance on ice. nothing really profound. except suggestions as fast food for public. charming but not remarkable. because the desire to say all story, the fear to present a half face of things makes a touching cold drama.the respect for time spirit is impressive. but not enough. because an old tea cup is only part of a museum. not piece of other place.

Underwhelming as expected

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 15 July 2017]

"Das Gelübde" or "The Vow" is a German 90-minute movie from 2007, so this one has its 10th anniversary this year. The director is Dominik Graf and he is also one of the writers here. Having seen some of Graf's other stuff, I must say that he is a definite contender for most overrated filmmaker from Germany as honestly there is very little appeal to the works I have seen so far. I will elaborate on that in a second. As for this one here, this period piece is a small screen release and this may be one of the reasons why it has not received as much attention as Graf's "Die geliebten Schwestern", another more recent period piece by the man that was submitted to the Oscars for Germany, but obviously did not manage the nomination. Back to this one here: There are some actors in here that German film buffs will probably recognize. These would be Birnbaum, Kobus, von Bülow and certainly also lead actor Misel Maticevic. The cast (especially the latter) is decent and I would not say it is their fault that the movie turned out disappointingly for the most part. The reason is rather the script. The film loses itself in reference to really existing people, but looking at the other production values I would be surprised if the film is accurate in any way from that perspective, I am not really too well-informed about Brentano, but I would be surprised if things really were the way they are depicted here. Maybe I am wrong. So lets talk about some other weaknesses. I personally feel that there is as almost always with Graf some cheap thrills in this film that are supposed to hide away the lack of depth when it comes to character writing/development and the story in general. One scene where this reference applies in here is certainly the physical torture/lashing scene. Also all the Jesus references fit the description. This is where the film tried to be way too significant for its own good and this is another description that is accurate for the majority of Graf films I believe. And there are some moments of overacting that add more negativity to it, especially when it comes to Schleiff. I guess it makes sense that she really isn't known at all in Germany now compared to her male co-actors despite playing the female lead in here. But even there I blame Graf a bit because a more gifted filmmaker would have tried to hold her back a bit, to keep her from going all in in a fairly cringeworthy way. So the positive in this film is definitely less frequent than the negative and I think the outcome here is pretty weak. Don't watch.