In the Basement's reviews
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Seidl uses the peculiar relationship of Austrians to their basements as a way to pick away at the cracks between our public and our most private selves.
El Mundo
Everything in the movie scares, entertains and finally, horrorifies. Ordinary people that dynamite the word of ordinary. All that threatens to be normal exploits.
The Hollywood Reporter
This off-the-wall film essay entertains hugely while it makes the audience squirm in their seats.
New York Times
This often hilarious movie descends into the unseen spaces of Austrian homes -literally and figuratively- and creates a stage for their residents? fantasies of sex, violence and power.
Cinemanía
Seidl often contemplates these individuals while they are still looking at the camera, in a type of fixed flat seeking humour undaunted and reveals the austrian as a morbid version of Wes Anderson.
Fotogramas
The director gets that reality seems to fiction. And, when we are immersed in his game, he allowed the luxury of make us understand that matters little what is real and what not.
Indiewire
But if precise, clinical dissections of fetishes, freakishness and folly are your bag (and they?re so ours) you?ll find a great deal here to admire, laugh at and be oddly moved by, at least after the initial shock has worn off.
Variety
Others, meanwhile, will accuse Seidl of not being objective enough, as his stylistic affectations and interferences with reality may create aberrance or uncanniness where there is none.
El País
Seidl found mixed answers to the question: what hide the austrians in the basement? None of them is reassuring.
La Vanguardia
As austrian laughs at his compatriots ruthlessly imposed by distance and respect. As good filmmaker he knows descend towards those basements of rot. These basements are catacombs of human misery.
Festival Internacional de Cine de Lanzarote