re:mote voices

Title: Ghosts [Gespenster]
Cast: Julia Hummer, Sabine Timoteo, Marianne Basler
Director: Christian Petzold

Ghosts is a day in the life of a teenage orphan in Berlin, and the two encounters that shape events. First she witnesses another girl being attacked, afterwards the two drift around together. The new girl homeless and looking for the next person to take advantage of. In their travels they meet a French woman, who is looking for her missing daughter, becoming convinced that the orphan girl could be her.

Ghosts plays with a variety of themes - loss, loneliness, sexuality, celebrity, grief and the like. The performances of the three leads are interesting, the two characters pulling at the girl in the middle – each with their own agenda and looking to come out on top. The film really being about the girl’s quiet tragedies.

However the big problem with Ghosts is that it is too focused on the one day. Of the three characters, only the mother has any kind of real history – that of the missing daughter. We only really get glimpses of who the two girls are – which is frustrating on the whole. The two teen girls come across as being the ghosts of the title, too fleeting to really understand who they are and what their motivations are.