Wir Monster (2015)

After a long, unhappy marriage, the parents of fourteen-year-old Sarah—Paul and Christine—have separated. This turns the world of their adolescent daughter upside down. Her behavior is unpredictable, and she plans to disrupt her parents’ new lives. Paul wants to go on a concert tour with his band, while her mother, Christine, plans to go on vacation with her boyfriend, Michael. So Paul takes Sarah to a holiday camp. On the way, the girl insists that they take her best friend Charlie too. The two friends get into an argument during the drive, and Paul pulls over at a parking area. The girls disappear into a patch of woodland. After waiting for a while, Paul goes to look for Sarah and Charlie, exasperated. Suddenly he hears Sarah scream and finds her at the edge of a dam reservoir. But Charlie has vanished. Her backpack is floating in the reservoir. In a panic, Paul drives to the police to report the accident, when Sarah openly admits that she herself pushed her friend off the dam. The concert tour is canceled, and Paul tries to shield Sarah. When her calls go unanswered, Sarah’s mother also cuts short her vacation and drives to Paul and Sarah. Since there are no witnesses and they want to protect the emotionally fragile Sarah, they decide together to cover up the deed as an accident. No one is to find out, so they can protect their daughter from being charged and convicted, and from having to run the gauntlet at school. But Sarah turns out to be a little monster: happy to see her parents reunited, she shows no remorse. When Charlie’s father turns up looking for her and grows suspicious, the situation increasingly spirals out of control, and Charlie’s father dies during an argument. Paul and Christine take him to a road so that it will look like a hit-and-run traffic accident. Christine realizes in horror: “We’re monsters.” The drama escalates when Sarah says the next morning that Charlie isn’t dead and that she made the whole thing up just to “get back at them.” Paul and Christine don’t know how to deal with this. They stand speechless, facing Charlie, who in turn accuses them of being responsible for her father’s death. She knows he had been with them last, and threatens to go to the police with this information. Hysterically, Charlie starts shouting, and when she bites Paul’s hand as he tries to cover her mouth, Christine knocks the girl down with a rubber mallet that happens to be within reach, so she will finally be quiet. Christine and Paul watch in shock as the girl sinks to the floor. The two look at each other questioningly while Charlie lies on the floor, groaning. The ending is left open.