Epilepsy and Illness Narratives in Hans-Christian Schmid’s “Requiem”

A.M. Castro 

After winning a Best Actress Oscar for her role in the 2023 legal thriller Anatomy of a Fall, and receiving rave reviews for her portrayal of Hedwig Höss –the wife of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss— in the Oscar winning Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, Sandra Hüller has established herself as one of the more courageous leading ladies of our time.

While both films deal with wildly disparate subject matter, Hüller quietly deals with grand moral questions that manage to manifest themselves in the mundane work of everyday life.

In The Zone of Interest, Hüller manages to convey how someone as categorically evil as Hedwig could be recast as Every Woman –someone not so far removed from our own daily lives, whose middle-class comforts, ranging from her orchard to her clothes, are underwritten by her complicity in the death of millions.

In Anatomy of a Fall, Hüller accomplishes the opposite in demonstrating how muddled intentions, barbed comments, and careless actions within a toxic relationship can be interpreted by outsiders as categorically evil.

Perhaps it’s the subdued tenacity with which she approaches these characters that makes Hüller so unique. But this range combined with her record of art-house films in European cinema, has earned Hüller comparisons to international stars like Liv Ullman and Ingrid Bergman and made me a loyal fan girl.

In that sense, as we approach spooky season, it’s worth revisiting her very first film, Requiem.

Shot in 2006, Hans-Christian Schmid’s Requiem is loosely based on a real-life case of Anneliese Michel, a West German college student who died of exhaustion from a botched exorcism in 1976.

This same case inspired the 2005 movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a hybrid horror flick and courtroom thriller which attempted to recreate the aftermath of Anneliese’s death as her parents and priest were convicted with manslaughter.

But Emily Rose and Requiem could not be more different. Schmid’s film offers a nuanced and richly complicated portrayal of its protagonist, renamed Michaela Klinger, who stands at the intersection of religion, womanhood, and familial expectations while simultaneously casting an unsparing view on how these tensions impact someone afflicted with epilepsy.

Played by a fresh-faced Hüller, Michaela is an intelligent but pious 21-year-old from a rural German town where religion is a fundamental part of daily life. In the opening scenes, Michaela struggles to pedal on her bike up hill to pray at a church. Once she makes it, she kneels down at the altar and the word “Please” emerges as her singular plea. Quickly the scene transitions to her opening her mailbox. In nervous excitement, she runs with an envelope to her father’s welding shop, “It’s here!” she exclaims, flushed by the long bike ride back. It is her long-awaited acceptance letter to Tunbingen University.  

Yet rather than the normal celebratory round of hugs and kisses, her parents cautiously look at Michaela and each other. A worrisome silence permeates the occasion. Michaela asks what the problem is. Her father patiently responds, “You can try it out for a day. See how it goes!” Michaela objects and looks at her mother who responds, “How can you with your thing?” with cold indifference (Requiem, Schmid).

Her ‘thing’ is left unstated. But the viewer soon learns Michaela is struggling with a seizure disorder. While she is intellectually ahead of the curb and hasn’t “had anything I six months,” this affliction has already caused her to lose a year of school.

Eventually, she’s allowed to attend Tunbingen.  In her first week, she reconnects with an old friend from her village, who her mother disapproves of, and goes skinny dipping. These idyllic scenes abruptly cut to Michaela, her father, mother and younger sister bowing in prayer over the dinner table in a long, protracted silence.

When they do begin to eat, Michaela speaks about how wonderful her first week at school has been and about Hannah, her new friend. Her mother, however, is less than pleased and objects to her friendship given Hannah’s father’s alcoholism. Moreover, her body language communicates complete skepticism about Michaela’s further enrollment.

The following morning the family heads on a pilgrimage to St. Carlo sponsored by their local parish. The priest, Father Landau, is pleased to see Michaela in attendance as he knows she’s now a college student. Surprised, she replies “But I always come!” (11:00) At night, her mother who has been remote and cold gifts her a rosary. Michaela, touched, thanks her “I won’t disappoint you.” and goes to hug her but the mother rejects her and goes back to packing (13:08).

In the morning, Michaela wakes up thirsty. She stumbles to the kitchen with her new rosary in tow. But as she drinks water, she collapses, realizing she is having her first seizure in months, only to be found by her father who promises not to tell her mother anything.

In these first 15 minutes Hüller sets up the main tensions that plague Michaela throughout the film. Her performance makes Requiem stand out as a meditation on patient suffering, as the self and others perceive, judge, and weaponize a highly stigmatized chronic illness, rather than a rote exorcism flick.

We watch as Michaela’s entry into college life becomes less of an escape and more of a calvary.

We observe as she struggles through her symptoms and all who would have her make the correct meaning out of them, despite whatever Michaela herself may want to ascribe to her medical condition.

Throughout, we are asked to suspend our own judgments and understand why Michaela chose the treatment path she took.

Without giving too much away, one of the more heart-wrenching sequences in the movie happens at a party, while Deep Purple’s “Anthem” blasts in the background. Michaela grooves awkwardly almost spasmodically by herself on the dance floor awash in a neon halo. From the sidelines, her classmates and the boy she likes watch her.  

The scene comes soon after Michaela’s pilgrimage with her family to St. Carlo and is meant less as a montage of youthful fun and more as a metaphor for Michaela’s solitude as she attempts to reconcile who she is.

First, through this dance sequence, we understand Michaela as mystic. Someone atypically religious for her age, who frequently references Saints like Katherina of Sienna.

Martyred in the 4th century by a pagan Roman emperor, St. Katherine was known as a princess and noted scholar who converted 1,100 souls to Christianity. She endured several types of torture including the breaking wheel, scourging, beating and finally, beheading.  St. Katherine’s story provides Michaela with as much solace as it does psychogenic suggestion, to the point where she can understand herself as a martyr, especially in moments of uncertainty with her family and her own faith.

Second, in her jerky movements, we see her teeter between her desire for independence at university while also grasping at a contradictory need for maternal comfort from her iron-willed mother.

Throughout the film their relationship evokes ideas of hystero-epilepsy. As defined by Freud, “hysteria originates through the repression of an unbearable idea from a motive of defense ... By virtue of its repression, the idea becomes the cause of morbid symptoms, that is, pathogenic.” In other words, Michaela’s seizure disorder keeps her conflict with her mother out of awareness while simultaneously expressing it symbolically.

Because her mother is deeply religious, strict and frigid, Michaela’s rejection of religious symbols during an episode can be interpreted as another manifestation of this conflict. Her epilepsy, in that sense, embodies the deeply personal crisis of her mother’s rejection.

In the end, the hard reality of dealing with an active, chronic medical condition that has no definitive start or end point with little hope for substantive treatment undergirds Michaela’s motivations and choices.

Even with a startingly supportive social circle that understands what she’s going through, Michaela is reticent to discuss her condition with her friend Hannah, who finds her unconscious one day.  “Why didn’t you say? Epilepsy!” scolds Hannah, who names it quite clinically. “That’s why you weren’t in school.” Michaela dries herself off with a towel “I’m so sick of it.” (Requiem, Schmid) Michaela admits to the shame that comes with her condition. Given the nature of her relationship with her mother, she begs Hannah not to inform her parents or else she will be sent home.

Hannah reluctantly agrees on the condition that Michaela go see a doctor. Instead, Michaela goes and visits the priest who soon becomes her exorcist, at her behest. The rest is cinematic and real history.

Without additional spoilers, it is a heart-breaking film. Its brilliance lies in presenting an illness narrative that offers no straight answers. The audience is unclear as to whether Michaela’s case is one of epilepsy, psychogenic psychosis, or possession. What stands out are the questions around why people who are faced with treatable diseases may want to build narratives that would impact them negatively.

Narratives, as philosopher Paul Ricoeur would put it, are a particular form of sense making. They have little to do with T- truth, rather they help organize who we are in relation to where we are with our sense of progression, our families, our peers and our communities. Illness Diagnosis, on the other hand, is defined by anthropologist Arthur Kleinman as “an idiom for mutual understanding between physician and patient,” a medical narrative.

While arguably an Illness Diagnosis is closer to a T-truth than a generalized Narrative, rarely is the latter exact. And in Michaela’s case, it outright fails to provide her with any sense or truth.

The film is less about Michaela being possessed but more about what structure she needs to understand herself and give her family a lens through which to understand her. Narrative then becomes reality, and the audience is left to grapple with Michaela’s subjectivity and a milleu saturated by neurological, cultural and religious meanings and how these impact the interpretation and treatment of illness, with devastating accuracy.

It's worth noting that this film, as well as the original case itself, is set in 1976 during a particular moment between religion and science. Exorcisms had not been in vogue for several decades, but with the release of William Peter Blatley’s highly successful The Exorcist in 1973 and several other films and books in the same subject vein, the Catholic Church started to see a resurgence of the Roman ritual.

Additionally, epilepsy as a condition was also seeing certain shifts occur. Conceptions of epilepsy as demonic possession had gone by the wayside with the Enlightenment in most developed nations. Informed by Dostoevsky’s description of epileptic characters, neurologists in 1974 began typifying behavioral changes for patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, including hyper-religiosity, hyposexuality and hypergraphia. The 60s and 70s also saw an accelerated process of drug discovery and neuro-imaging equipment. The former included the discovery of neurotransmitter inhibitors while the latter allowed doctors to view brain lesions that can cause seizures.

But despite these scientific advances, stigma continued in residual legal forms across the world, including forced hospitalization. In one scene, when Hannah asks while looking at Michaela’s brain scan “Is this the brain of a crazy person?” the answer up until that point in time had frequently been “yes.”

“Of all diseases,” writes neurologist and Dostoevsky scholar, Ivan Iniesta, “Epilepsy epitomizes the struggle of mankind through a combination of predisposition, chance, and character which help determine an individual’s destiny.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, an epileptic himself, best exemplified these struggles with epileptic characters who navigate the intersections of diametrically opposed moral realms. In The Idiot’s Prince Myshkin we have the ecstatic epilepsy of the pure, Christ-like soul amidst a rotten, aristocratic world. In The Devils, Kirilov’s episode is an embodiment of the social convulsions of radical nihilism that lead him to self-destruction.

In Michaela, who is a sensible, intelligent, and capable woman, we see this moral collapse –to a more proportional, quotidian scale— of someone who must reconcile the secular and the religious, the carnal and the sacred, her convalescence and her sickness. She emulates St. Katherine of Sienna while she embodies the typical college student: experimental, sexually active, irreverent to her parent’s authority. Meanwhile, her parents, particularly her mother, live in a world of ordered categories and assigned roles. They cannot understand change outside of these boxes. To them, their daughter -figuratively and physiologically—is a tectonic shift.

In the end, the audience isn’t left wondering so much about why she chose the narrative she did, but about what epilepsy, psychogenic psychosis, and possession mean for Michaela, family, and friends and how they react to it.

Moreover, the film calls into question absolutist claims made about either condition and brings up the possibility of a more pluralistic approach to epilepsy care. There is no question that missteps were made during the administration of care in the original case that Requiem is based off. It is a sad fact that Anneliese Michel died of starvation and dehydration after the 67th exorcism attempt.

But with respect to the subject matter, the movie invites us to sit with the struggle of dealing with a chronic condition. As medical experts attempt to make a ‘diagnosis by exclusion,’ (Requiem, Schmid) the film shows how poorly prepared care networks can be equally damaging: Why was this allowed to happen? Should this have been allowed to happen?

Questions aside, the film is a master class in acting and characterization. Hüller manifests a human, almost pathological, understanding of the divine when it becomes arrested by the suffocating grip of the mundane.  And, similar to her later work, grand moral questions are more unsettling when they are wrestled with in the crushing quiet of the home.

In that sense, Requiem forces us to recognize that –when we too are confronted with the terrifying reality of our own fractured minds and bodies on the breaking wheel of the day to day, the only thing we may be able to do is get on our knees and pray.

Sources

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Sigmund Freud, "The Psychotherapy of Hysteria" in Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses (New York: The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Publishing Co, 1912), p. 102.

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Langwick, Stacey A. “Devils, Parasites, and Fierce Needles: Healing and the Politics of Translation in SouthernTanzania” Science, Technology, & Human Values, 32:1 (Jan., 2007), pp. 88-117 Sage Publications, Inc.

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