Hysteria (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: whenever surveillance is shown or implied
Take a Drink: for every mention of the forbidden act
Take a Drink: for any internet search
Do a Shot: whenever Elif really messes up
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
Germany has for many years been more open to taking in immigrants from the Middle East than many of its European brethren, a decision that has presaged cultural and demographic changes extending to all parts of its society.
Hysteria is a specifically German story, but one without very many or possibly any people of Germanic heritage in it. A director with a Turkish surname is shooting a film recreating a real far right firebombing that killed five members of a Muslim immigrant family in 1993. He’s brought extras from a nearby refugee center to play those who had to comb through the ruins of the house after the fire was extinguished, getting the genuine reactions he was looking for, but also some trouble- one finds a burned Quran and asks whether that can be allowed in a film, even one recreating a real atrocity. Things spiral pretty far out of control from there.
A Toast
Director Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay, himself a natural-born German citizen of Turkish heritage, kicks things off with a striking beginning- security cam footage of the fire attack occurring which we only learn is a recreation minutes later. This air of surveillance, of paranoia and distrust, will never let up over the course of the film.
Our protagonist is an assistant director, Elif, herself daughter of a Turkish father, and she soon finds herself caught in between a rock and a hard place when a mistake leads to the footage that includes this forbidden act being stolen from the home of the director and his prominent producer wife (the only person we meet whose background is not made explicit).
Suspicion falls on the three refugee men who were brought to set that day, each with their own particular viewpoints on this central question of the burning of the Quran- the devout Muslim who originally points it out, the atheist who nonetheless sees it as racist, and the younger man who makes eyes with Elif, and seems more interested in assimilation than anything. They all butt heads in their own way with the horoughly Westernized director who defends his artistic intention, even as the atheist points out how these kinds of stories are the only ones Western filmmakers tell about his people, perhaps to assuage their own privilege-driven guilt.
These are but some of the many faces of Middle Eastern heritage in Germany/Europe in general these days, and Büyükatalay plays with our preconceptions without, leading up to an ending that rhymes with the opening in its pitch black tragicomedy.
Beer Two
Elif’s motivations are obscured to start out with, but not in a way that really makes you question her intentions in the same way that all of the other characters are just ambiguous enough to keep the infernal wheels of the plot turning. Essentially unmooring us from a protagonist altogether would have been a bold move, but may also have fit better with the ending.
Verdict
Hysteria is a paranoid and darkly satirical examination of different facets of the Muslim experience in Western Europe.
