REVIEW: Grimm Love

Grimm Love is a movie not for the squeamish. If a person thinks they can handle gory subject matter, then perhaps even the strongest person is unprepared for the heaviness of the true story of Armin Meiwes and Bernd-Jurgen Brandes. The story is of two lonely men meeting in a chat room focused around the fetish of cannibalism. Meiwes was seeking to consume and Brandes was seeking someone to consume him.

Martin Weisz directed the movie Grimm Love which was written by T.S. Faull. An interview with Faull sheds more light on how he approached the story. Names were changed and the story has a fictional element in having an American woman (Keri Russell) researching the story. Russell's solemn narration style keeps the haunting inner thoughts fresh in your mind.

The cinematography is exceptional; superbly showing how the grainy flashbacks depict desperate emotions. Oliver (Meiwes) is played by Thomas Kretschmann who also played the boat captain in King Kong and played the Pope that same year he played a cannibal. Kretschmann is excellent as the lonely, awkward Oliver; innocently unnerving and creepy, yet not maliciously cruel. Thomas Huber plays Simon (Brandes) and you may have briefly seen him in Æon Flux, but he's mostly known in Germany. Simon is unfulfilled by traditional love relationships and seeks to satiate a need to "make things right".

A very cold, somber ending closes the story, thankfully not taking us through the routine arrest, trial and sentencing. It is a story of psychological horror, a view of the loneliness of these two individuals.