This almost 10-year-old movie is a definite contender for longest German film in recent years. It easily passes the 150-minute mark and yet manages to drag on only very few occasions. Most of the film is well done and will have you curious about what is gonna happen next. A lot of that is thanks to lead actors Jürgen Vogel and Sabine Timoteo. I also liked Zapatka's performance while I thought Hennicke was fairly forgettable. The film is directed by Matthias Glasner and also written by him with the help of Judith Angerbauer and Vogel himself.Let me say that this is a very graphic movie. Vogel plays a convicted sex offender and in the first 10 minutes we already see how he rapes a young woman. A similar scene happens at the end of the movie and that is by far not everything. No taboos here and the ending is very tough to watch as well. Yet, it never feels that these scenes were just included for the sake of it. They all serve a purpose. Even if we know the main character is a violent monster, we still feel with him and hope he can be cured and will not commit any crimes again, maybe even become happy with Timoteo's character.The movie takes place in Berlin, but as a Berlin resident, I have to say the references were not that big. I only remember a metro station sign. It's all about the question if he can defeat his evil desires and choose love over all the temptation that constantly seems to follow him. My favorite scene is maybe near the end when he realizes what he has done and what is going to happen to him (again) in the bathroom. Maybe the best-acted scene from Vogel's career. In terms of impact, the ending is very important too. I liked how joggers just ran by not realizing the drama that had just taken place. Also the decision of Vogel's character is also a very clever reference to the film's title. I am not sure if I would watch this film anytime soon again, but it I certainly recommend it if you are interested in the subject, appreciate films with little dialog and can deal with the heavy material. Finally, i want to add that I very much liked the way "Ave Maria" was used here.

I saw this at the German Film Festival in San Francisco, and having been to a few of these before, I was prepared for a depressing experience. What's with these Germans? Anyway . . . this is a brutal, thorough, carefully crafted portrayal of the tortured life of what Americans call with politically correct blandness a "sex offender." Our protagonist, Theo, is raping his third victim when we meet him. He is a smoldering, violent thug. We next encounter him, 9 years later, as he is released from a mental hospital into a supervised residential setting. He is a broken man. He is riding a beast he hates, and he has no idea when the beast will bite again.As a portrayal of psychology, angst, subtlety of emotion, and real human relations, I would give this film a 10. The sparring session between Theo, and his budding girlfriend Nettie, is a brilliant display of the subtle forces which are torturing the both of them. The fact that these two people have the sparsest dialog in the history of cinema may not be realistically correct, but it is an excellent artistic way of turning the focus to their inner emotions. This film is art, after all -- not a documentary.The only reason I didn't go for 10 stars is that I had a persistent feeling that something was missing. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I would have liked some back story about Theo's youth, something that would make him a whole person. The film does work without that, but it is a lack that a writer and director of such brilliance could somehow have remedied.This is not a feel good, date movie.

A very good film about the emotional and psychology of a raper who, after nine years of condemn, is free under supervision. He gets a job and begin a relationship with a girl who has is own psychological peculiarities.The film goes deep into the emotional and psychology of the main characters, specially the raper, and through a very good acting from both of them and a good manage of silences and dialogs, the film really makes the people get into the movie to feel the horrible suffering side from the point of view of the victims and the struggle that Theo has to deal inside with.Also it shows to us the hard part of knowing and, after, accepting the past life of Theo by Neeti. At the end and after hard struggle within, Theo realizes that he can not fight against his own "frei Wille".The film is indeed too long but it never makes you feel bored or lose interest. A very impacting and good film.

I, too, saw this film at the Berlinale, and though the matter of rape was treated with maturity and frankness, the film itself was constructed poorly. More than anything, it was bland - camera placement and cuts were standard fare, non-diagetic sound was near non-existent, and the dialogue was highly unrealistic, comprising of long, drawn-out pauses interspersed with briefly-spoken lines.The upshot of this was that I felt no attachment to the characters beyond a basic sympathy for their current predicaments - dialogue was stretched out to the point of losing its emotional resonance, and many lines were delivered with little feeling from the actors. I was particularly unconvinced by Sabine Timoteo's performance, whose talent restricted her to screaming rather than actual crying. Compared to Claire Dane's stunning depiction of anguish in Romeo and Juliet, I felt wholly unsatisfied by her performance.It was these factors that made the characters feel less than human, failing to imbue them with life. This, coupled with the utterly bland direction and editing, meant that I felt no attachment to them, and I was left gagging for each coming line of dialogue purely to provide a break from the silent, expressionless moments in between. Drawing out the narrative to over two and a half hours simply rubbed salt in the wound.The Free Will was not in itself awful, but there were so few points of interest that I found myself becoming restless within forty minutes, and when the credits rolled in what will doubtless be considered a brilliantly emotional finale, I still felt little attachment to the characters.