“How you are normal and the oddities of the other world” Is one of these films that you really want to like because there are so many ideas and ambitions. You want to praise the project of the project, especially since Florian Pochlatko delivers his directorial debut here. But the examination of the almost overpowering normativity is a promise that remains unresolved in the ironic title. To a certain extent, the problem can be moored at the preceding quote from Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci. It says, probably decisive for the following film: “The old world is dying; The new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of the monsters. ”Probably nobody who reads these lines would want to deny these words their grip.
They don't just sound cool, due to the pictorial wording, you can also quickly attribute the author to attribute a dissecting and insane contemporary analysis. And with it probably also the one who quotes them. However, the matter has a catch, and after this suspicious introduction it can already be guessed: the quote has been falsified, so never wrote by Gramsci. Basically, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who once translated it freely in an article. Well, that's how you could object, is the wrong quote really such a big problem, and if so, not better in the university seminar than in film criticism? Perhaps. But the whole thing is very clearly illustrating what it is in Pochlatko's wild-complicated debut film. Because, like the alleged Gramsci quote, Pochlatko's cinematic dystopia is particularly missing: a foundation.
Pia (Luisa-Céline Gaffron) first has to find its way back in her old world-but more than her illness, but she becomes through the demands of her environment.
This foundation – what keeps Pochlatko's film going – is a mystery. The protagonist Pia (Luisa-Céline Gaffron) was apparently in a psychiatry for a while. What exactly happened seems unclear. At least nobody dares to address the circumstances of their absence directly in the personal environment of the fellow of the fellow. And yet there is a certain suburban mentality in this homeland, including the fear of the incomplete curriculum vitae. What causes her father Klaus (Cornelius Obonya) to explain Pia's absence through a semester abroad in Essex and to integrate her into his media company as an office assistant.
The thematic premise then opens up to the audience very straightforward, albeit somewhat hidden by the countless formal gadgets with which Pochlatko comes up. Trained under Michael Haneke in Vienna, the native of Graz is mostly similar to the filmmaker Jessica Hausner (“Club Zero”) and, as you can see in the work of the Austrian how economic crises are plagued. On the radio and television, persistent floods in Austria, Germany and Slovenia as well as venison in Crete can be heard, while Pia's father hopelessly defends himself that his company is swallowed by the media conglomerate “Friendly” (an Amazon parody).
A psychotic dystopia
This is the world in which Pia returns, a world in which every person in their environment now lies different demands on them: their father, who tries to overcome her as early as possible as possible of the world of work, her mother (Elke Winkens), who still has to prove that the discharge from the clinic was not premature. Perhaps the most serious thing, however, weighs the matter with Joni (Felix Pöchhacker), her friend, who wants the Pia back, which he knew before the hospital stay. He once wrote to her on a postcard that he would always think of her. Now she finds herself in her WhatsApp course.
In this way, in Pochlatko's suburban dystopia, all sorts of ideas chain themselves together, which, however, turn out to be trivial with increasing term and also start formally uninspired. For example, the image format is repeated, sometimes film-in-film moments also join, which indicate all the aspects of constructance that Pia faces-sometimes even the story itself in which it is located.
We took a closer look again: No, this is not Ed Sheeran, with whom Pia dances there.
Motivic, the clown face also runs through the film, which Pia is again and again enamelled, with which Pochlatko makes a loose and strange connection to Todd Phillips' “Joker”. Instead of the radicalization, which in “Joker” follows the falling out of the social network in a simple form, Pochlatko's debut remains in the stage of an unthinkable opaque of this world (s) and the figures that they populate. “The film of your life,” the musician Daniel Johnston is quoted, “all other leading roles and you are found in him.”
But it does not work with PIA, just as the repeated reference to Johnston makes. Because where the music of Johnstons was characterized by radical sincerity, which even goes so far that it hurts properly, “how you are normal and the oddities of the other world” is primarily an eclectic arbitrariness. . In this way, independence does not want to appear, neither at the figure nor at the director level. Pochlatko hovers over the things and is rarely ready to get involved in the specially created scenario or to empathize in his characters.
A quick look into the future
When Pia finds itself next to her fellow patient on the terrace at the end of the film as in the first scene, despite all the chaos in which the plot has maneuvered until then, nothing seems to have changed. The circle seems closed. And yet in the last setting, an outbreak announces. Looking into the dark night beyond the camera, Pia's fellow patient says the future. “And she is Bright,” he adds in view of the questioningly contemptuous PIA. Carrying sunglasses try to make out the outlines of this future, a view that remains inaccessible to us viewers. And even if Pochlatko has long lost us at that time, there is something conciliatory in this last scene – if only for a moment.
Conclusion: With his debut film “How you are normal and the strange things of the other world”, the Austrian Florian Pochlatko provides one thing above all: how difficult it is to develop a staged manuscript. In the middle of a confusion of stylistic arbitrariness and a fader social analysis, it has to be stated that it is currently still looking.
We saw “how you are normal and the oddities of the other world” as part of the Berlinale 2025, where it was shown in the Perspectives section.