KRANKE SCHWESTERN - English
2011 · 12m · Germany
Directed by Rita Gloria Curvo
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
At the Clinic for Nymphomania, where no men may enter, the director secretly employs repairmen to fix the plumbing - a bizarre surreal comedy.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A nymphomania clinic that smuggles in men to fix pipes—this is the kind of premise that makes you genuinely unsure what you're about to watch, and Curvo leans into that disorientation with real subversive glee. It's absurdist sabotage dressed up as surreal comedy, and it refuses to signal whether you should laugh or feel unsettled.
Curvo situates herself in a lineage of Buñuelian institutional satire, though the 2011 execution flattens what could have been sharper formal play—the surrealism feels more decorative than structurally committed, a missed opportunity for the kind of considered visual rhythm that would anchor the conceptual premise.
The genius move here is casting the plumbing repair itself as the film's emotional center rather than the clinic's absurd premise—that single choice to ground the surrealism in physical, unglamorous labor gives the whole thing unexpected weight and makes the absurdity actually land instead of float.