Award winning writer, director and producer.
In the wild satire Bernadette Wants to Kill (dir. Robert Herzl & Oliver Paulus), death is the new sex and it’s available online to anyone who wants it. On a site called Woundland on the darknet (the hidden part of the internet), there’s a variety of profiles of killers you can accompany on a murder or ask them to murder you. It’s a world where privacy and consent do not exist, there is no moral or conscience, but there are millions of followers and the phone camera is tantamount to a gun or knife. Porn is dead, long live snuff!
The Austrian-Swiss film tells the story of Bernadette, an elementary school teacher who finds herself fantasizing about killing someone. This new urge leads her to a failed suicide attempt which streams live unbeknownst to her to three million viewers. Bernadete becomes a momentary internet celebrity and finds herself in a community of “perverts” like her who want to kill to feel alive. The film starts off as a satire and gradually forms into a poignant criticism of Instagram/TikTok culture and the deep moral damage these apps cause humanity. It’s a blood-soaked hunt for followers. Those followers, according to the film, are just as guilty as the internet celebrities who perform these violent crimes, in a world where murder is a performance and human life is a prop.
Still from Bernadette Wants to Kill, 2024
Digital Rape
Bernadette Wants to Kill is not a film about murder, but about exposure. The main character’s biggest fear isn’t dying, it’s being documented. Nowadays, it’s a common occurrence, people share intimate pictures and videos of others without a second thought, without considering their life might be ruined, without taking responsibility; that is exactly what our main character is running away from. Bernadette doesn’t want exposure forced upon her. She doesn’t want to become anyone’s content. And perhaps that’s what makes every character she meets record her secretly and steal her moment with herself; to perform digital rape on her.
Rape by definition refers to taking something without consent. In the case of filming and documenting a person without their approval or knowledge, the body becomes public and no longer belongs to its owner. It’s put on display for many to see, cheapened to momentary entertainment and leaves the filmed subject without an ounce of control over the situation. The body is not the one being assaulted, but rather the right to privacy and anonymity.
Digital rape exists in our everyday life. You meet friends and hug them and notice a friend or colleague or someone unrelated filming it all and then posts and tags you without asking if you even want to be filmed. You sing karaoke on a birthday party and suddenly there’s a video of you drunk, butchering a version of Shallow with bits of broccoli in your teeth and your pants unzipped. Before you can even ask politely (and embarrassingly) whoever posted it to untag you, your grandma is already writing a comment to it and it’s clear to everyone from her wording that she thinks she’s writing it to you privately… and just like that your private moment has been taken away and it’s no longer private and no longer yours, and no space is safe anymore because we are in the era of anonymous paparazzi.
The Audience as an Accomplice and the Death of Privacy
The film’s creators shine a spotlight on the audience that consumes the gruesome murder videos and define it as an accomplice. The videos are accessible and at time look like a show or a music video, accompanied by propulsive music, vividly filtered colors, and even a chat window where you can comment on the murder live – exciting! The violence is no longer an act of an individual, but of many, of groups, of audiences, of a community without empathy who doesn’t care that the blood spilling is real. Nobody feels guilty because nobody feels responsible. The internet celebrities give the viewers what they think they want and the viewers watch and take it. A destructive harmony.
Still from Bernadette Wants to Kill, 2024
We could watch the film and say “it would be so awful if this is what it’s going to be like one day” or we could be honest with ourselves and admit we are already there; internet junkies. Helpless slaves to applications that waste so much precious time of our life and change our behavior whether we like it or not, and not for the better. You can deny it all you want, but deep down you know it’s also true about you. Your empathy is growing weaker, pieces of your self esteem are falling off and your sense of judgement, not to mention your decision-making ability, are not what they used to be before you joined the vicious cult of online networks and let it take your soul. The body even depends on it, the dopamine released every time there’s a notification, and thus, instead of looking at the view from a train or reading a book that’ll open your mind or talking to a friend you met for coffee, your eyes are on the screen and the finger keep refreshing again and again and again and again and again in the desperate hope that maybe the next moment some complete stranger will give a damn about you, because the person sitting right here in the flesh is no longer enough.
We have created a world that has completely done away with morals in exchange for views and shares. We turn loose our sick, sadistic side, which is meant to stay in our subconscious, and watch or send each other videos of deadly attacks on WhatsApp and share them on our Stories. All news sites use violent gifs on their homepage to lure you, “Com see! Disaster! Exclusive!”, playing them on repeat without us even pressing them, without us agreeing to see these images, that we won’t be able to sleep at night because of them. And what’s ahead? What is the next expected step for humanity in the commercialization of violence? Noose lapel pins? Indeed, hell is already here and we have created it all by ourselves.