NEWSPAPER QUOTES
A powerful portrait of loneliness, showing how a longing for love peters out to sexual kicks and how an escape from an inner void leads to self-destructive excess: Christian Becker’s and Oliver Schwabe’s “Egoshooter”. 19-year-old Jakob drifts through life without a purpose and records himself with a video-camera – as if that way he could find something like a self-portrait, a shape or an identity. He secretly watches his brother with his pregnant girlfriend in the bedroom, observes himself masturbating or his friend performing as a hip-hop singer. He gets drunk, commits burglary and smashes up some furniture in the process. It is a stroke of luck to have Tom Schilling for the leading part. He already added moments of greatness to “Napola” and here, where the narrative form is that of a video diary, he brings a challenging believability to Jakob’s fragmented attitude towards life.
- Süddeutsche Zeitung
A likeable debut. Best of luck for its cinema-release. Same for “Egoshooter”. The festival’s most radical experiment deals with a 19-year-old’s fictitious diary. Tom Schilling as a drifting boy on the look-out. Snapshots somewhere between universal “teenage angst” and the “generation crisis” ’s attitude towards life.
- Berliner Zeitung
The Hofer Filmtage’s hidden star is a young Berlin guy called Tom Schilling. (...) In Hof he was twice magnificient as a son of a Nazi-Gauleiter in “Napola” and as a time-wasting, drifting young adult, who tries to make up for his inner void by the means of video recordings, in Christian Becker’s and Oliver Schwabe’s “Egoshooter”. You sense that Tom Schilling will never become another Tom Cruise, but he might become another Gene Hackman. The kind of guy you could watch for hours if he read out from the New York phone directory. Consequently “Egoshooter” is a one-Schilling-show, that has him roam the streets of Cologne. He hardly does anything apart from the minimum and only sometimes, if his environment becomes too banal, points the camera at himself.
- Die Welt
Tom Schilling’s characteristically wayward presence also pervades “Egoshooter”, a staged video diary, where it seems as if Schilling were continuing the role he played in “Agnes and his brothers” (Agnes und seine Brüder). In a similar project with real young people the directors Christian Becker and Oliver Schwabe had established both the limits and the potential of this method. With Schilling they thus reconstructed their film format, creating situations in which the actor was able to move freely. The result is an interesting dualism – on the one hand a portrait of youth, but also a document of the courage of an actor willing to take part in this experiment.
- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
