Laurin

8/23/2026

*Laurin* was made in 1989, although somebody appears to have forgotten to tell the film. With its saturated reds, misty rural interiors and faces arranged as though Hammer Horror had only just shut up shop for the evening, Robert Sigl’s film looks several decades older. That is not merely decorative nostalgia. Its slightly unreal appearance helps turn an appallingly grim story into something closer to a corrupted fairy tale. Laurin is a young girl living in an isolated German village where boys disappear and the adults prove remarkably poor at joining the dots. She sees the missing children, experiences visions of her dead mother and gradually understands more about the returning schoolmaster than anybody around her. Yet the film rarely treats those supernatural intrusions as shocks. Th