He seems to have magical hands – Zhenia, the masseur. He is even revered as a savior. What makes this man so special?
Berlin – what a treat a massage can be! When the fingers gently press into the muscles and release even the most stubborn tension.
Zhenia, the main character in “The Masseur”, also seems to be particularly talented. At least his customers can’t get enough of him. But what is really going on?
Even the first scenes of this German co-production seem puzzling. With a massage table over her shoulder, Zhenia escapes from Ukraine across the border, puts a customs officer into a kind of trance and disappears. He later turns up in a wealthy, isolated suburb settlement full of single-family homes. There he goes from door to door and is already expected.
A frustrated wife longs to be touched and dreams of sexual freedoms. A man suffering from cancer puts all his hopes in Zhenia’s gift, and at another appointment the masseur is even supposed to use his skills on dogs. But who this man is, whom they let get so close to them, where he comes from, nobody cares.
In flashbacks one learns that Zhenia experienced the Chernobyl disaster as a child. To what extent this changed him, however, is only hinted at. Instead, the Polish filmmakers Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert take an unusual look at our affluent societies in this quietly told satire.
But above all, because of its unpredictability, because of the absurd, sometimes very funny situations, “Der Masseur” develops its own pull, which one cannot easily avoid.
Der Masseur, Polen, Deutschland 2020, 123 Min., FSK oA, von Malgorzata Szumowska, Michal Englert, mit Alec Utgoff, Agata Kulesza, Maja Ostaszewska dpa
