Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Seven Days Sunday"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The German film Seven Days Sunday marks the feature directing debut of Niels Laupert, a 33-year-old director of TV commercials and music videos. Laupert seizes on the true story of a couple of sixteen-year-old boys whose alienation and general confusion turns them into thrill killers for a night. One thing you can't accuse Laupert of is glamorizing psychopathic violent behavior. The way he tells this story, the two anti-heroes Adam, (Ludwig Trepte, who looks like Seth Cohen from The O.C. after a personality transplant with a woodchuck) and Tommek (played by Martin Kiefer as a scrawny-legged sweeb with a John Hinckley haircut, a tattoo on the side of his neck, and a pathetic smirk that seems intended to come across as threatening), are driven to kill out of sheer boredom, and to really hammer than point home, Laupert overloads the movie with some of the deadliest, most overextended scenes of just sitting the fuck around ever captured on film. (Seven Days Sunday runs eighty minutes and feels at least twice as long.) Martin Kiefer's performance has to be seen to fully appreciate just how unconvincing an actor playing a supposedly charismatic, dangerous adlescent tempter figure can be. He makes Crispin Glover in River's Edge look like Dr. Mabuse.

The Screengrab : martin kiefer

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Seven Days Sunday"