Hysteria opens with eerie stillness. A lone figure sleeps under the whir of a ceiling fan — silence stretches until it’s shattered by an all-consuming fire. It’s a bold opening: five dead, a home reduced to ash, and a sudden plunge into chaos. It sets the tone not just for the movie within the movie, but for the emotional, ethical, and artistic inferno that follows. This is not a film for the faint of heart, or for those looking for easy answers.
At its core, Hysteria is a film about the making of a film: a controversial art-house project that aims to explore religious persecution and the transience of human life. But the meta-narrative spirals into something far more complex — a mystery where truth is fractured, perspectives shift like sand, and every character carries a quiet scream beneath their breath. When a real Qur’an is burned on set-an act meant to provoke “real emotion”, the line between performance and reality dissolves. Riots follow. People disappear. Keys are lost and found. Paranoia blooms like wildfire.
The protagonist, caught between loyalty to the film and moral unease, becomes the audience’s anchor, but even she is slippery, fragmented, and unreliable. Her relationships with others — the vanishing driver, the haunted extras Majid and Mustafa, the manipulative director, the seemingly helpful yet predatory crew member — form a web of suspicion. Is she complicit? Is she a victim? Is she hysterical? The title becomes a diagnosis as much as description.
What makes Hysteria deeply unsettling is not its pace, which is unhurried, but its simmering tension. It’s a film that moves like smoke — slow, disorienting, and suffocating in its ambiguity. Every character acts as a mirror to the trauma of the other, and no one emerges clean. The film interrogates the ethics of representation: At what point does art become exploitation? Can real suffering ever be staged without consequence? It offers no clear answers, only the suggestion that creation and destruction are often one and the same.
Religious symbolism haunts the film like a ghost. The Qur’an burning becomes the nucleus of all the chaos, igniting not only protests, but a deeper existential panic. Faith, guilt, identity, and racism all collide under the same scorched roof. The film’s climax — another house fire, this time consuming the creators of the original blaze and that circle back to the opening scene with cruel poetic justice. It’s not closure, exactly, but consequence.
The film is unflinching in its commentary on the film industry itself — a space where obsession often masquerades as vision, and where morality is conveniently blurred in the name of art. Everyone in Hysteria is trying to do what they think is right, and yet they all end up wrong. Racism is both overt and implicit, on both sides of the cultural divide — Germans, Turks, Muslims, refugees, artists — all tangled in a knot of blame, silence, and fear.
By the end, nothing is certain except death. And maybe that’s the point. In the final inferno, the characters who tried to control the narrative are consumed by it. The title Hysteria doesn’t just describe their descent; it indicates the system that fuels it.
The final verdict? Hysteria is not just a film: it’s an ethical experiment, a fever dream, a slow-motion collapse. It’s provocative, often frustrating, but nevertheless unforgettable. It holds a mirror to the politics of art, religion, and the migrant experience. It dares us to look, even when it burns.
Hysteria is part of the German Film Festival, taking place at Palace Cinemas in Sydney from 2 to 21 May.
