This heroine teaches men to fear! She wears a ski mask and develops extreme powers against men who have raped women. Instead of meaningless Bang Boom Bang, the RTL+ series Appropriately Angry gets down to substance, which is why Each episode is preceded by a trigger warning is.
In Reasonably Angry, a raped woman is not a victim, but a superhero
In Reasonably Angry, Amelie (Marie Bloching) works as a chambermaid in a hotel. Acting chameleon Bernhard Schütz plays the womanizer boss who likes to declare transgression as niceness. If guests do the same, he covers them up.
For Amelie, her job is pure routine. She is quite amused by the fact that some guests find the pretty maid outfit in a dress that is far too short sexually stimulating (one guest sits naked on an armchair). She is best friends with her gay colleague Tristan (Bless Amada) and Johanna (Shakiba Eftekhari-Fard), who goes in and out of the hotel as a call girl. They talk about dating, the endless search for an apartment in Berlin and the job.
Female hysteria becomes a weapon in the RTL+ series
The camera is broken again when Amelie takes the elevator to the staff area. A guest follows her and misunderstands her professional hotel smile. Amelie says “no” loudly and clearly several times, which doesn’t convince the guest (Laurence Rupp). Elsa van Damke decides against showing the rape. Instead, the microwave starts, the dishes fall out of the cupboard and Amelie ends up lying in a pile of broken glass.
As a result of the incident, she develops a superpower: she recognizes by touch men who have been aggressive and violent towards women, and can move or break things with her anger. From then on she attends – albeit reluctantly – a self-help group for victims Together with Tristan and Johanna’s help, she resorts to vigilante justice as the superhero “Hysteria”. She takes men to task with ever more drastic means and makes them suffer physically as an avenger. The series shows this clearly. Amelie goes through the typical stages of a superhero: from finding her mission, giving her a name, to the big showdown when she encounters her trauma.
Crazy superheroine as a selling point
Appropriately Angry is declared a dramedy, the comedy elements lie in pitch-black situations. When Amelie tells Tristan about the rape, he, rather than she, bursts into tears. Of course, the police officers act stupid and insensitive when the heroine finally decides to file a complaint against unknown people. Amelie’s harshest punishment suddenly becomes a triumph of a worse kind. But is that really funny?
That’s not the point. Director Elsa van Damke, who wrote the script together with Jana Forkel, focuses on hard truths. The crazy story of a superheroine or better: The story of a crazy superheroine is simply intended to sell the rape topic better. Everything on a low budget basis. A few garbage cans fall over or a package of champagne bottles explodes and one or two men will no longer be able to get up from their hotel bed because Amelie first prevents them with her strength and then ties them up. But that’s about it for the superhero powers. The authors of the series are not concerned with the big show either.
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Frustrating Facts in Reasonably Angry
For van Damke, the superhero genre isn’t that far-fetched, because after all, every woman has to constantly scan men for their trustworthiness. The facts that van Damke sprinkles into the series are even sadder. In the first episode, Amelie refuses to go to the police. Tristan asks her why. The screen slowly fills with real newspaper lines – from the failed Rammstein trial, a directing award for Roman Polanski, to Gina-Lisa Lohfink’s accusation against two men who are said to have given her knockout drops for sex. Lohfink ended up in court himself because of false accusations.
Later, the men exposed by Amelie appear in court. Van Damke doesn’t show the process, but switches the setting. Suddenly we find ourselves in the middle of the quiz show “Who will be acquitted?” The person who answers correctly is free of any guilt and van Damke throws in new, frustrating numbers. Only a pitiful eight percent of reported rapes result in conviction, the series says. (Probably Germany is meant.). A frustrating record that provokes anger against such injustices. But how do you actually be appropriately angry? Although the series is poppy, you can feel the serious background. Of course, a lot of it is exaggerated by pitch-black humor, but it still hurts.
Appropriately Angry consists of five episodes and will stream on RTL+ from November 25th.