5 Films to watch from Dominik Graf, Germany’s John Carpenter

The Oldenburg Film Festival, Germany’s leading indie film fest, has devoted its 2024 retrospective to the movies of Dominik Graf. The ridiculously prolific filmmaker —  Graf has more than 50 films and TV series to his credit — is rightly hailed as “Germany’s John Carpenter”: An auteur director who walks the line between genre and arthouse cinema. In his long career, Graf has made everything from neo-noir thrillers to period romance, from coming-of-age comedy to police procedurals. His work has been hailed as pioneering and groundbreaking.

And you’ve never heard of him.

Don’t be embarrassed. Graf is that rare breed of director that despite decades of excellent work has never crossed over internationally. Few of his films have been released outside Germany. Most of his best movies were done for German TV.

So for all those Dominik Graf newbies, i.e. pretty much all of you, here’s a primer of his top 5 films to watch.

Treffer (1984)

The spirit of Roger Corman and the best of exploitation cinema roars through this early Graf feature, a biker thriller with enough style to burn. The coming-of-age in the sticks plotline is universal but the setting — rural Germany in the early 80s — is unique and Graf draws surprisingly emotional performances out of his young leads, none better than Dietmar Bär, who shines as an initially comic, but ultimately tragic village blowhard, who ends up the ultimate fifth wheel, drinking by the fire while his friends make out around him.

Die Katze (1988)

Graf’s classic bank heist film stars Götz George as a criminal mastermind who beds Jutta (Gudrun Landgrebe), the wife of the bank director, in the film’s opening scene, then proceeds to direct the robbery from outside, anticipating every move by the police as he tries to not only to make off with the contents of the safe but also extort a DM 3 million ransom in exchange for the hostages. An ice-cold thriller that manages to be surprisingly emotional as well.

Spieler (1990)

This German answer to Jean Luc Goddard’s Bande à part is ostensibly a love story between an adventurous schoolgirl (Anica Dobra) and a nerdy gambling addict (Peter Lohmeyer) who get caught up in a series of improbably, but highly entertaining, escapades that seem (deliberately) drawn from crime film cliches. The German script, heavy on wordplay and puns, loses a bit in translation but Spieler, made two years before Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, remains a post-modern gem full of in-joke references for the genre cinephile.

The Invincibles (1994)

Graf’s attempt to make a Hollywood-style paranoid action thriller on a German TV budget [DM 12 million or around $6.5 million at the time] was likely doomed to fall short of its bigger, splashier U.S. counterparts. But for its ambition alone, The Invincibles is worth watching. And the action in the final half hour, when Graf goes for broke, can go toe-to-toe with the best.

Fabian — Going to the Dogs (2021)

This adaptation of Erich Kastner’s classic 1931 novel, about the rot at the center of the Weimar Republic and the menacing rise of Nazism, sees Graf at his most stylistically ambitious. Eschewing the period film aesthetic, he shot Fabian, featuring Tom Schilling (A Coffee in Berlin), Albrecht Schuch (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Saskia Rosendahl (Never Look Away), like a 90s indie, using mostly natural light and a roaming, reactive camera, but edited the picture using 1930s “modernist” techniques, splicing in black-and-white archive footage and using multiple-window splits screens, making the movie feel simultaneously old-fashioned and cutting-edge.