"Electric Girl": Superheroes in the night program – testimony to ARD's discouragement

In her debut “Electric Girl”, Ziska Riemann manages to strike a balance between superhero comedy and psychogram.

A party in a hip loft somewhere in Hamburg. Music fills the room, people stand together, talk, dance. Mia (Victoria Schulz) takes her company through the crowd, greets friends, introduces Jakob (Björn von der Wellen), who brought her here, to her friend Lissy (Svenja Jung). This is followed by banter about who knows whom from where, scraps of conversation about everyday things. But Mia cannot get into the situation, observes what is happening like an outsider. She is restless, has a different perception of the environment and finally steps on a parapet unnoticed by bystanders. One more hesitation and she jumps into the depths.

Jakob and Lissy see the jump at the last moment and rush towards the abyss. But Mia did not fall, she is standing on the fire escape of the adjoining building. How she got there, Ziska Riemann’s film Electric Girl leaves as open as many questions that the viewer asks. Does Mia, who plays the role of the Japanese superhero Kimiko as the voice actress under the direction of Jakob, acquire supernatural abilities herself when she is electrocuted? Is it the grief for her terminally ill father that makes her search for an alternative reality? Or does it rise into an illusion in order to escape the banality of everyday life?

“Electric Girl” (ARD): Surprising scenes and twists

The film skilfully keeps all interpretations in balance and develops a character with Mia who is less forcing identification than she is tearing the viewer through the film with her energy. On the one hand, the team of authors around the director and co-authors Dagmar Gabler, Angela Christlieb and Luci van Org create a clear storyline: Mia, like her role model Kimiko, fights to save her hometown from (imaginary) monsters. On the other hand, they structure the film with often surprising scenes and twists, in which Mia always hurries ahead of the audience without losing it. Their unpredictability becomes the engine of a broken superhero narrative that sets the film apart from the schematic narratives of its American counterparts.

With Victoria Schulz in the lead role, Electric Girl also focuses on an actress who has not yet frozen in the role clichés of German acting careers and who has the courage to give her character sides that not only affect her environment, but also the audience in front of them Head can bump.

“Electric Girl” (ARD): Electricity as a monster from Kimiko’s world

When Jakob introduces Mia to his friends, whose conversations revolve around the latest apps and cloud applications, the protagonist confronts the group with their fixation on everything technical. While Mia sees the monsters from Kimiko’s world appear in the electricity, criticism is also hinted at a society that is increasingly tied to its technical devices and in whose conversations trivialities are established, while for Mia it is about existential questions. Schulz also knows how to portray the fine line in her game on which Mia balances between her newly found destiny as a superhero and drifting into a dangerous megalomania.

Electric Girl succeeds in staging a balance between superhero comedy and psychogram, in his joke to show an alternative to the often flat humor in German films and to take his characters seriously without fear of their contradictions. The fact that such a film is pushed into the late night program by ARD is a testament to the discouragement of those responsible for the program. (Jendrik Walendy)