M&M: The Hour of the Lynx

A young man arrives in a snowy small town and seemingly without reason brutally kills an elderly couple in a house. The man, by the name of Drengen, is caught and brought to the high security area of a prison. There the young psychologist Lisbet does an experiment by giving the inmates pets. Among them Drengen, who gets a red furred cat. Another inmate gets jealous during yard exercise time and throws the cat over the fence. Surprisingly Drengen has bonded a lot with the cat and ends up killing the other inmate in anger. The cat is found again. But Lisbet has to abandon the experiment. Since it's the last time with the pets, Drengen gets the cat back to say good-bye. But he claims that it's not his cat. He's convinced that god is speaking to him through the cat and pushing him to commit suicide. Lisbet doesn't know what else to do but involving the priest Helen.

Drengen is totally withdrawn and there's nothing they can get out of him that makes much sense. Helen persuades a guard to lock her in with Drengen in his cell over night. In the night Drengen starts talking and things start to make sense when he begins to talk about his past. You've got to watch yourself to find out what he's telling. The original title of this Danish-Swedish movie by the way is I lossens time.

As you can see above, Drengen is a young man, who is not afraid to use brutal force. So this movie isn't a totally easy one. Apart from those two murders however, the movie impresses by being markedly calm and makes one wonder, even well after the closing credits are over, about topics like blame, forgiveness and belief.

By the way, the source material for this movie was a theatre play The Hour of the Lynx (original title: Lodjurets Timma) by the Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist and is a play for five people, which premiered in April 1988 in Stockholm. The premiere for the German version was in 1992 in Ingolstadt. In 1991 the Hessische Rundfunk (Hessian Broadcast) and Sachsen Radio (Saxony Radio) together produced a radio play version of the theatre play.