Amnesia (I) (2015)
5/10
Unsatisfying
3 December 2017
Warning: Spoilers
In 1990, shortly after the reunification of East and West Germany, a young German deejay named Jo moves to live in Ibiza, hoping to find employment in the title nightclub there, along with his friends in the same business. He meets Martha, a mysterious elderly woman living alone in a house there, who turns out to have also be German, yet not willing to speak her native language or have any association with her native country. As a friendship between them develops, Martha finally admits her disdain for her former homeland came from seeing ugly secrets at the end of World War Two. Jo knows about them, but only through history classes and from recollections from his mother and grandfather.

His career goals becoming achieved, his grandfather and mother come to visit for a dinner...but unsurprisingly conflict develops between them and Martha, and between Jo and his grandfather as he finally reveals his past. What will come of all this? Unfortunately the character development of the first part of the movie feels wasted. Martha and Joe and his relatives come across not as people, but different sides of "how should Germans react to their Nazi past" question. Everything else is anticlimactic after that scene, and the final scene of the movie only feels tacked-on rather than a resolution. The scenery is beautiful and the performances work, but the movie is still an overall letdown.
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