Young Törless

Young Törless (Der junge Törless, 1966) — watch this German-French drama online on iFILM, Volker Schlöndorff's feature debut, adapted from Robert Musil's celebrated novel.

An Austrian boys' boarding school, early 1900s. Two students, Beineberg and Reiting, catch their classmate Basini stealing and decide not to report him — they turn him into a private experiment instead, running a slow, escalating campaign of humiliation and sadism behind dormitory doors. Törless watches all of it. He is neither tormentor nor victim; the whole business interests him as a psychological puzzle more than it troubles him as a wrong. Mathieu Carrière plays him with a detached, almost clinical composure that makes him the most disturbing figure in the room.

The film took the International Critics' Prize at Cannes 1966 and is regularly cited as the opening shot of the New German Cinema movement. What makes it land today is not the cruelty itself but Schlöndorff's focus on the observer — and on how a certain kind of intelligence learns to use watching as an alibi. Watch Young Törless (1966) on iFILM.