Movie Review: SYSTEM CRASHER (2019)

Written and directed by Nora Fingscheidt, System Crasher is a movie that builds its narrative on the struggles of growing up. However, this growing-up is not a simple and ordinary one. Benni is a 9-year-old child who is taken care of by the social and community services in Germany. Displaying hyperactive behaviours and lacking anger management, her rebellious character refrains her from settling down in anywhere. She gets continuously expelled from group homes and foster houses because she always gets herself in trouble due to the damages she causes.

Though she has a mother, social services find her insufficient to take care of Benni, therefore, Benni ends up living in various group homes, psychiatry clinics and foster parents till her mother qualifies for being a good parent. While Benni feels like a complicated character at first glance, it becomes obvious as the movie narrates further that the only thing she longs for is to receive love, especially from her mother. The movie continuously highlights Benni's need for parental love, which she tries to find in other people or living things whenever it gets unreciprocated by her mother. In my opinion, this big hole inside her turns into the different form of external expressions such as anger and rebellion.

As her love for her mother is left unreciprocated from time to time, she starts to identify some people around her as her parents. This gets more apparent when she insistently calls Micha, her instructor, father. She even goes further, imagining to kill Micha's family so that he would be her father. It might seem almost like an evil thought, but in reality, she is just a 9-year-old girl desperately needs to be loved.

Towards the end of the movie, while the mother finally qualifies enough for taking Benni back, she realizes that she doesn't want to live with such a problematic child. She confesses that she is scared of her behaviours and doesn't dare to let Benni live with her. At this point, I think one can question many things about parenting. Love, as the movie implies, is not a sufficient factor in a parent-child relationship. The parents have to take the necessary responsibilities to look after their child.

However, the movie actually doesn't blame anyone. All the characters are displayed in their complexity, which makes it difficult to judge and criticize them as if the things are black and white. All the characters have certain motives and reasons to act the way they do, and movie perfectly makes all of them collide in a compelling yet conflicting narrative.