I Saw ‘Angst,’ the Most-Disturbing Movie Ever Made, in Theaters

I’m not entirely sure how I discovered Gerard Kargl’s feverish, controversial feature debut, Angst. Unlike other arthouse serial killer movies like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or experimental horror films like Begotten, I didn’t stumble across a still of it on Tumblr or find it on a listicle of the most disturbing movies of all time. What I do remember, though, is the sensation of a layer of film on my skin, an urgent need to shower, and something that reminded me of the nausea and exhilaration you feel after getting off a janky carnival ride. Hours later, I realized that this must have been what the film’s nameless killer (Erwin Leder) felt as he plunged a kitchen knife into his young victim’s chest over and over again, blood spraying on the walls and into his mouth.

This isn’t the kind of film you’d watch on a date, unless you were the couple who sat in front of me during a recent screening of Angst at Low Cinema, John Wilson’s single-screen 42-seat movie theater in Ridgewood, Queens. It’s also not the kind of film you’d watch while sharing what looked like an entire rotisserie chicken, which is also something this couple decided to do. Then again, this isn’t the kind of movie that you can tell coworkers you casually went to see by yourself over the weekend without inviting a few questions, the first, and most stressful, being: what is Angst even about? 

Angstis, at its core, a home invasion film that follows a killer (loosely based on Werner Kniesek) as he wanders through the Austrian suburbs shortly after his release from prison. He breaks into an isolated house deep in the woods, where he traps, tortures, and kills the entire family– an elderly mother (), her daughter (), and her disabled son ()–one by one before stuffing their bodies in the back of their car and driving it to a cafe, intent on scaring his next batch of victims to death.