Sous-Sols

Une expédition irrésistible dans la bizarrerie humaine, des choses enfouies dont ne parle pas. Un panoptique de personnages avec toutes sortes de perversions, étonnamment littéraux et ouverts, se déroulant comme une comédie sociologique obscure. Seidl marque des points non seulement par une sélection des représentants les plus caricaturaux des différents domaines fétichistes, mais surtout en les filmant de manière absurde dans une composition d'image caractéristique. Et aussi par l'assemblage graduel et émotionnel de la mosaïque de leur diversité. (22/05/2021)

Wait out the first few minutes of boredom and this documentary gets seriously good. The huntsman and the musician that excitedly tell us all about the things in their basements quickly make room for a lady who keeps a fake baby in her basement and caresses it… Still relatively okay in terms of weirdness. But soon enough, you won’t believe your eyes. This brings voyeurism to a whole new unexplored level and now I finally know what the Austrians keep in their basements. And believe me, I was in such a shock that I failed to notice that some parts didn’t happen in a basement. (22/08/2018)

"A guy stands in a three-minute static shot with a small dick peeking out of his shorts. Where the fuck is the message?" The gentleman walking up the projection stairs in front of me summed it up best. It’s shallowly shocking, telling us absolutely nothing about the people in question. The stereotype of the general view of Austrians squeezed into an eighty-minute distillate. (28/10/2014)

In the Basement is a film about how people are different. And they are really very different and have different needs or desires, which is brilliantly shown in the film. I'm not one of those who will engage in any of what was presented here, but I certainly don't object to those people who do it here continuing to do so. So why not? The film is very sincere, which is good. (11/04/2017)

A film that will grab you by the balls. Looking into Austrian basements with Seidl is the audio-visual equivalent of reading discussions on news servers. It is perversely entertaining and terrifying at the same time. The fact that you won’t find a similar concentration of exotic creatures even in all the of cable reality shows combined arouses the suspicion of a calculated attempt to shock. However, I believe that for Seidl, basements are a generally applicable metaphor for physical and mental isolation from the outside world. Several of the participants talk about how their past lives “out there” disappointed them and how only “down here", away from the prying eyes of society, can they fully satisfy their desires, whether that involves dusting Nazi artifacts, pulling plastic babies out of shoeboxes or spanking (one of the more normal sexual practices you will see here). Also, the brass band playing outside is always framed by the entrance to the garage, thus figuratively defining the mental horizons of the people being filmed. Confinement in one’s own world and the unwillingness to accept stimuli that contradict one’s established worldview are, I’m afraid, gaining strength thanks to the internet. It is easy to imagine a person sitting in front of a monitor instead of a figure standing in the middle of perfectly symmetrical shot compositions. Like the denizens of internet discussion forums, the people profiled in In the Basement also display a higher degree of exhibitionism, somewhat paradoxically, despite their desire not to let go of their fabricated micro-worlds. It’s not enough that you have a head full of fascist-sexist views. It is necessary to have a place where you can proudly spout them. Regardless of the degree to which some of the situations were staged, I didn’t register a hint of shame or insecurity in any of the social actors about how they spend their free time. Some perversions simply go so far beyond us that the limited space of our own consciousness (and subconscious) is not enough for them. Just as the obviously small cage is not enough for the woman in the last shot, who has had herself locked up in it. 75% (16/10/2015)