An eight-minute abortion, shot like a real one, with no dialogue. That’s the scene at the center of The Alienated, and Anja Kreis filmed it that way on purpose. She’d written monologues for the patient and the doctor, then threw them out on set, because she realized nobody talks in that moment. What she wanted was the thing you almost never get to see on screen: death itself, observed plainly. She holds it long enough to make you sit in it. “You never see death in real life,” she says. Her film hands you the chance and refuses to look away.
Kreis is not interested in comfort. She’s interested in the dark room everyone keeps locked.
An Homage to Her Mother’s Clinic
The film started in a memory. Kreis’s mother is a gynecologist in Russia. As a child, Kreis spent hours in the clinic, and it became her hidden world, a strange place full of strange women and strange events. She loved it. That’s the seed of The Alienated, and it’s why she poured everything into a film with almost no money behind it. She wanted to make something about her mother, her family, and the place that fascinated her.
What grew from it is stranger than a memoir. Varvara, a philosophy professor, teaches her students about the death of God and turns the question of evil over in her own mind. Her sister Angelina, a gynecologist, performs an illegal abortion on a girl who claims she’s carrying the Antichrist, then takes the embryo home. The two women may not be sisters at all; one reads as the other’s shadow, a doppelganger. Kreis builds the film from something personal underneath the nightmare. She has a sister too, and their childhood relationship was difficult, tangled with jealousy and rivalry. On one level, the film is about the poison that can gather between two women who know each other too well. On another, it is about the hidden interior life people spend years trying not to look at.
Why Death
Kreis circles death openly, without the flinch most people bring to it. She traces her own films back to a common thread and lands on exactly that: death, the process of it, the body after. To her it’s the mystery at the center of being alive, the thing everyone secretly wants to understand. She knows how it sounds. She says it might be creepy, not normal, then shrugs it off, because everyone in the cinema world is a little strange anyway.
That refusal to flinch shapes how she makes things. She’d hired someone to cut the trailer, then rejected it as, in her word, shit, and recut it herself in three frantic days. She shot the film in long single takes, one shot per scene, partly by necessity and partly by instinct. The restraint is the point. She’d rather hold one honest image than bury a scene in flash, and she’s allergic to the bloated alternative.
I need to be in a very uncomfortable situation to make my films, because limitations make you more creative.
That conviction sits at odds with her hero. Marcus reads her a David Lynch line: stories should carry the suffering so the filmmaker doesn’t have to. She half-disagrees on the spot. She admires Lynch enormously, calls him a person of real freedom, but says she personally needs the discomfort to create. That tension runs through her whole method. She reveres an artist who said protect yourself, then does the opposite.
How Lynch Saved the Film
The Lynch connection runs deeper than admiration. Every actress Kreis approached said no. The two sisters she first imagined turned her down, then a red-haired lead she pictured, then more. She was desperate. One night she watched Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir about a blonde and a brunette tangled in a Hollywood dream that may not be real. It won him Best Director at Cannes. She lets herself watch one Lynch film a year, to keep the pleasure rare.
Something shifted. Seeing Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, blonde and dark, gave her a new way into her own casting. She stopped chasing the actresses in her head. She went looking for a blonde and a dark-haired woman instead, found two on social media, and both said yes. She calls it a sign, like Lynch saved her film. The deeper borrowing is thematic too. One of Lynch’s women lives a life that doesn’t exist, which is exactly the unstable ground The Alienated walks on.
She’s careful, though, about what you can take from a genius. Her German film school taught her to learn from normal directors. Not Lynch, not Tarkovsky, not Lars von Trier, because their styles can’t be duplicated. So Lynch isn’t a template for her. He’s a permission slip. The detail she keeps returning to is the production story. Mulholland Drive began as a rejected TV pilot that Lynch re-cut into a feature in one decisive stretch, and Eraserhead got made for almost nothing. As a director who also has to produce, she finds her courage in those stories.
From Telenovelas to Art House
Kreis didn’t grow up a creative kid, by her own telling. She liked biology and chemistry, went to music school without it taking, and figured she could have ended up a lawyer or a doctor. What she did have was an obsession. At ten or eleven, glued to Brazilian and Argentinian telenovelas, she taught herself Spanish by writing words on paper in front of the TV. There was no internet then, and no Spanish books to be found. She wanted to write a telenovela one day, maybe act in one.
She has a clean theory about why those shows gripped her. They’re Shakespeare for poor people, she says: simple stories of one family built from betrayal, lies, and jealousy. Those happen to be the raw materials of any screenplay. It pointed her toward simple human relationships and big dramatic feeling. The path from there ran sideways. A first degree in German language and literature, a plan to teach or translate, a year working at a German school for children with disabilities, then film school in Germany. The professors came from everywhere and the days were brutal. Lectures until afternoon, a restaurant kitchen shift, then editing in the night until five in the morning, for years.
Shut Up, You’re Just a Distributor
Kreis is funny and blunt about the marketplace, and she doesn’t pretend to be above the sting of it. Distributors asked for screeners of The Alienated, then wrote back with their opinions, and the opinions made her angry. She didn’t ask what they thought. She sent a link, not a request for notes. When one wrote to her about the film’s mise en scène, she was incredulous that a buyer was playing critic.
We have to give life to our films. They have to live, to be watched by other people.
Underneath the spikiness is the actual stake. She made the film on 85,000 euro, edited it herself, and finished post for around a thousand more. All of that came after a long pile of rejections from funders, actors, and partners. Getting into Karlovy Vary, she says, isn’t quite happiness; it’s relief, which might be its own kind of happiness. And she has no patience for inspirational filmmaking advice. She hates the keep-going, stay-true-to-your-dreams sayings. She offers the opposite: sometimes you should stop, and think about your mental health instead of being relentlessly strong. The full conversation is worth hearing for her voice alone: the dry fatalism, the death talk, the moment she tells off an imaginary distributor. All of it comes from a filmmaker who insists she’s lazy and just wants to sleep ten hours a night.
