On 25 August 2023, I watched a truly creepy German supernatural/horror-themed fantasy featurette (26 minutes long), with English subtitles, entitled Vienna Waits For You (aka Lace).
Directed by Dominik Hartl, written by Sarah Wassermair, and released in 2012 by Glaciar Films, Vienna Waits For You focuses upon a vivacious young woman named Anna (played by Petra Staduan), full of life and energy, who moves into an old apartment within a multi-storey block of them, situated in a run-down backstreet region of Austria's capital city, Vienna (which is where this mini-movie was shot on location).
The apartment's present tenant, an elderly woman, seems unexpectedly eager to move out of it, even leaving all of the furniture and knick-knacks behind as soon as Anna has signed the lease – signing it, I might add, without reading any of the fine print. Oh-oh…
As the apartment is shabby and dusty, Anna decides to clean and declutter it, taking several black bags full of the old porcelain figures, lace doilies on the sofa and elsewhere, and sundry other oddments filling the rooms to the waste disposal bins outside, but when she goes back inside the apartment she is amazed to discover that it is just as dusty as before, and that all of the knick-knacks are back in place too!
Anna tries repeatedly to clean and declutter, but it seems that the apartment has other ideas, because every attempt is met with failure. And could those be wrinkles and grey hairs appearing when Anna looks in the mirror the next morning...?
Yes indeed they could, because – SPOILER ALERT!! – it turns out that this eerie apartment, which has existed here in inconspicuous anonymity for countless years, totally unchanged, is both sentient and vampirish!
For it has derived the vital life energy perpetuating its own inimical, inexplicable existence by draining it from its unfortunate succession of tenants down through the decades, and which is precisely what is now happening to the once-lively, energetic Anna, causing her to age prematurely, and precipitously, becoming old and decrepit in just a few weeks from when she had moved in.
Moreover, just like so many of its previous tenants, Anna is resolutely held prisoner within its rooms by the apartment throughout her accelerated physical shriveling. Like I say, all very creepy, and unsettling too, especially when Anna discovers precisely what the only way to free herself from this nightmarish dwelling-place and her otherwise inevitable end caged within it entails.
Namely, she must achieve what her lucky predecessor the old lady did, i.e. she must be replaced while still alive by someone else, someone young and unsuspecting who is willing to sign up as its new tenant. In other words, she must deliver a new victim to the apartment in order to release herself from its lethal captivity.
In a bittersweet twist, Anna actually receives the chance to achieve this when her ex-boyfriend Daniel (Moritz Vierboom) who had recently dumped her for someone else arrives unexpectedly with his new girlfriend (this character is never named in the movie but is played by Cosima Lehninger). Daniel is interested in signing the two of them up as new tenants if Anna is willing to move out, but, ironically, he has no idea that the person he is discussing this with, the apartment's current tenant, is Anna, because she is now so old in appearance that he doesn't recognise her.
Yet despite her desperation to escape and also her upset at seeing Daniel with her replacement, Anna cannot bring herself to persuade her ex and his lover to take the tenancy, and thereby inflict upon them this certain death sentence in order to save herself. So she angrily sends the two youngsters away, despite knowing that in doing so she has doomed herself.
By the end of Anna's cruelly curtailed life not long afterwards, even her blood has been stolen by the apartment, having been somehow replaced by cords of thread, and upon her death her entire etiolated body is transformed into another lace doily for the sofa (explaining this featurette's alternative title, Lace), just like the bodies of all of the apartment's previous trapped tenants were, which is why there are so many doilies scattered around in its dank rooms…
Vienna Waits For You is a singularly macabre, grotesque cinematic offering, to be sure, yet, bizarrely, it also includes some deliberate comedy moments, and even various unexpectedly cheery strains of music at times. What it does not include, however, is answers to the many questions that it poses.
How, for example, did this fiendish sentient apartment come into being? Why has it never been discovered, exposed, and destroyed somehow by the authorities? And why does the apartment block's live-in apartment leaser (played by Alexander Fennon), assigned by local officaldom to oversee the legal exchange of leases between this apartment's unsuspecting incoming and (all-too-rare) deliriously joyful outgoing tenants, seem powerless to prevent any of this malevolent scenario from occurring, time and again, even though he is fully aware of what is happening?
All very strange, as is this mini-movie itself, yet hypnotically watchable too, even if the final transformation of Anna from dolly bird into sofa doily via her unnatural, unnervingly swift senescence makes decidedly uncomfortable viewing – not to mention requiring an exceedingly substantial suspension of disbelief!
Incidentally, I have no idea whether the following intriguing little fact has any relevance to Vienna Waits For You or not but it is sufficiently coincidental to warrant a mention here. Totally different from Ultravox's song of the same title, 'Vienna' is a very familiar song written by Billy Joel that he included on his 1977 album The Stranger, and in it he uses Vienna as a metaphor for growing old. Could it be, I wonder, that this song perhaps served as inspiration for the present mini-movie under review here, in which ageing and Vienna are so intimately linked?
If you'd like to watch Vienna Waits For You, all that you need to do is what I did – access it free of charge on YouTube by clicking here.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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