The buildup is almost too effective: we’re dying to know what horror young Helen witnessed, and the revelation is suitably upsetting. The problem is that once the big reveal is over, that plot thread is dropped almost immediately. This memory returns to Helen very slowly, over the course of at least an hour of screen time, and these flashback scenes are shot in a beautifully creepy, horror-adjacent style. In this case, Helen gradually remembers that when she was very young, her mother tried to gas herself and her baby brother in the oven. ![]() It uses a plot device I hate: the repressed memory that gradually resurfaces, usually with the effect of changing the viewers’ perception of the events we’re seeing. But elements of the film started to nag at me afterward. Her gentle personality is a great foil for Helen’s exuberance, and they bond in a way that also struck me as remarkably true to life for teenage girls.Īll of this occurred to me while I was watching Wetlands, totally enraptured by its humor and novelty. We mostly see Corinna in flashbacks, in which she’s a willing and gleeful participant in Helen’s insane experiments, even when they result in Helen having to dislodge a tampon from Corinna’s nethers using a pair of barbecue tongs. Helen’s relationship with her best friend Corinna (played by Marlen Cruse) is also portrayed in a wonderfully believable way. Her weaknesses and insecurities make her strengths more believable. Helen seems like a grown woman when she’s trying to seduce Robin, and five minutes later she’s crying because her mother arrived at the hospital ahead of schedule and missed her father. Carla Juri (who is actually 30) does a wonderful job capturing the way teenage girls can be completely fearless in one facet of their lives and terribly insecure in others. What I love about Wetlands is Helen’s bizarre charm. But in the course of her hospital stay, which she drags out on purpose, she also remembers a traumatic incident from her past that changes the way she looks at her parents, and she becomes attached to a young (male) nurse named Robin (Christoph Letkowski). When a freak shaving accident lands her in the hospital, she uses it as leverage to get her parents into the same room together in hopes that they’ll reconcile. She also undertakes several cringe-inducing experiments on her own body, which we later learn are acts of rebellion against her parents for splitting up. Early in the movie, the main character, Helen (Carla Juri), announces that her hobbies are having sex and growing avocados. It’s easy to get caught up in its charms and spend the movie wondering what this weird, adorable girl is going to do next. It has a whimsy and sprightliness that reminded me of Amelie, except that it centers on a sexually and hygienically adventurous teenager instead of a shy woman in her twenties. I was so charmed by the German comedy Wetlands (2014) initially that I didn’t think I had much to say about it.
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