Despite the film’s title, something bad can happen, and boy, does it ever.

The debut feature from writer/director Katrin Gebbe premiered at the Cannes Film Market last week and promptly sold to Austin-based Drafthouse Films for North American release. There is a motif that runs through many of the Drafthouse acquisitions to date – I won’t say what it is for fear of spoilers, but let’s just say that NOTHING BAD CAN HAPPEN will be right at home in purchasing cialis the Drafthouse family of films.

Tore  (stunning newcomer Julius Feldmeier) is a pale, gangly adherent to Christian punk collective ‘The Jesus Freaks’ who ends up moving in with a white trash family after helping them with a broken-down car. But what at first seems like a means of stability for the transient teen becomes a test of his faith as pharmacy cialis the family starts using him as a scapegoat for all their inherent resentments toward each other. The erratically-tempered (step)father Benno (Sascha Alexander Gersak) is increasingly threatened by Tore’s gentleness and composure, which serve to emphasize Benno’s own flawed, violent character. Framing the boy as some kind of ‘competition’ as a role model for his family, Benno responds by attempting to strip Tore first of his privileges, but then of his faith and humanity. But as the abuse progresses, Tore’s refusal to react only raises Benno’s ire further.

The film is a startling study of self-deception, of the need to dissociate and blame rather than accept our own complicity in situations of domestic violence. Tore practically walks into this situation carrying his own head cialis100mg on a platter, like a messianic figure delivering them all from their own hateful hearts. It’s full of squirm-inducing moments of psychological and physical cruelty that I don’t want to give away here, but suffice it to say that the family goes further into their own darkness than you would expect given the film’s subtle and somewhat dreamy tone, calling up comparisons to films as varied as SNOWTOWN and MARTYRS. An audible gasp could be heard from the Cannes audience when the film’s end credits scrolled up the sentence “Based on True Events”.

The film is very deliberately paced, and its ties to genre cinema are tenuous, but those who’ve been following and enjoying Drafthouse’s slate of releases know what they’re in for, and certainly won’t want to miss this riveting example of transcendent horror.

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer and programmer, founder of Spectacular Optical Publications and The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival (1999-2005) in Vancouver, was the Festival Director of Monster Fest in Melbourne, Australia and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (2005). She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press, 2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012) and contributed to Destroy All Movies!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (Fantagraphics, 2011), Recovering 1940s Horror: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington, 2014) The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale (PS Press, 2017). She co-edited (with Paul Corupe) and published the anthology books KID POWER! (2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She edited the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (forthcoming), and is currently co-authoring (with Amy Searles) the book ‘Unhealthy and Aberrant’: Depictions of Horror Fandom in Film and Television and co-curating (with Clint Enns) an anthology book on the films of Robert Downey, Sr., as well as writing a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter. She was a producer on Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime: the Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s and Sean Hogan’s We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea and her first film as director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is due out from Severin Films in 2020.