OPEN MIND

The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser

Werner Herzog's The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, a new print of which screens this week at BAMcinematek, isn't the legendary director's finest fiction film -- that honor belongs to Aguirre: The Wrath of God -- but it remains, after 32 years, his most sensitive and heartfelt character study. The typically morose Herzog left a mark on the German New Wave of the Seventies with a series of stories examining the darker side of human nature, a tradition he has kept alive in documentaries such as last year's Grizzly Man. Of course, Kaspar Hauser is nothing if not existentially bleak, but Herzog projects a striking quality onto his titular hero, one that prevails until the bitter end: sympathy.

Read the rest of the review in The Reeler...