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Whatever happens there with the unfortunate heroine “not in yourself”, with the film itself everything is within the limits of normal. Steveberg does not stick to the smooth directing of Stephen, either genre or stylistic infection - and his new work is sterile as an operating room. A bravely shot on an iPhone of horror films with attempts to say about the spirit of time? Let them talk. In fact, although pretending alternately by the horror, then a social drama, or even a technical experiment, in each of these hypostases “not in itself” exists extremely restrained, without revelations and even distinctive, “copyright” features, and ultimately remains a useless hollow object, a pile, nothing.

In the out -of -competition program of the Berlin festival “Not in itself” he visited the horror film. But it will be simply unfair to Horror's honest artisans to recognize this picture of genre. Let her heroine be in danger, let Slonberg put a maniac to her, hiding from the harassment of which she moves to a foreign city. Even at first this story has a paranoid taste: having completely exhausted by mania of persecution, businesswoman Soyer Valentini turns to psychiatric help - he receives a full program of insurance (or punitive, here it is one and the same) medicine. “Undress to the underwear,” the nurse lazily mumbles. From her monotonous voice, from a sleepy, stupid gaze, and indeed nothing worth it to fall into a sticky nightmare; This is how easily your life suddenly clenched to the size of a yellow office without windows. It is absurd and at the same time to yawn usually.

Yes, only at a rude reception in the registry all fears (at least for the viewer) will end. Not just being locked in a mental hospital, but also meeting his pursuer from a past life (someone David, he materializes from nowhere in the guise of a health worker), the heroine gradually begins to doubt her own reason. But instead of keeping the secrets to the end, leaving the viewer in a pleasant tension, Soderberg is almost immediately pronounced in the close -up: look, but the same David throws an extra psychotropic tablet into the patient's glass! Further, the director, as if nothing had happened, continues to exercise in the classic canon of the horror: in the basement, then in the garden, then in the trunk of the car - he will be found everywhere on a fresh corpse ... How many senseless victims for such a monosyllabic plot! Having given the answers to all the key puzzles of the plot, Sodaberg leaves the heroine to stagger along the monotonous dark corridors - already in every sense aimlessly.

It would be suspected that under the terrible larva of the psychotriller hides social drama and an author’s commentary on topical topics: stalking, sexual harassment, scams of medical companies and totalitarian traps of democracy (various social institutions successfully cooperate in order to tightly tighten the gym to Miss Valentini - for her, for her, it was good for her).

All these topics are actually present (or, more precisely, cumbersome) in Soderberg’s film, but throughout the current agenda it passes with the speed and restraint of a stenographer, who does not have time to decipher individual words and phrases, because you need to rush further. Soderberg throws all important and correct concepts with indifference, or rather, with the dosed participation of the therapist on duty. Each problem is written out a standard recipe: a fraud system with insurance - exposure and criminal court, a maniac is a retribution, and the victim of persecution is the hope of rehabilitation. Director version of compulsory medical insurance. Sign here.

But maybe all social circumstances are the same inevitable convention as genre canons? After all, Soderberg, in the end, formalist, by the technical specifications of films, he was always passionate about much more than people who inhabit this or that frame format. So here - the next experiment with the budget and the terms of shooting, the directorial call to the production imperfections of the iPhone camera (the victory turned out to be incomplete - some scenes had to be removed to the camera). The first 15 minutes “not in yourself” as if everything confirms: a wide -angle lens, bending the image at the edges, fancy survey angles, including shots taken by the phone left on the table. Unfortunately, Sawyer should fall into the dungeons of a psychiatric hospital, as we forget that the operator has an iPhone in the hands of the operator. The corridors of the hospital, the chambers of the patients, the highbus belts and loners upholstered by felt-all this and in itself is so hopeless, painfully, turned out that the “fish eye” hardly brings something new to this kingdom of claustrophobia. The microcamer with all its plastic potential, together with the heroine, is surrendered for compulsory treatment. Here, every bent frame will find its own horror diagnosis with the prospect of subsequent normalization. When around-the scenery of a horror film, a deformed picture looks just predictably and normally.

It is curious that even few truly unexpected and shock moments of the film are charming in their ... everyday life. So, a brief audience of enthusiasm is caused by the half -minute appearance of Matt Damon, stomping on the periphery of the plot in the quiet role of a retired policeman. With a soft intonation of a specialist, he will give a desperate heroine everyday recommendations - to park under the lantern, avoid photographs, retire from all social networks. Such a routine, customary was and remains the main element of Soderberg, the most valuable resource of his films. "Yes, I am more normal than all of you!" -the video phenyst from the most successful work of the director once broke into a scream. And the same cry breaks through in each subsequent experiment - not as a requirement of a new normality, rather, as a recognition that any revolution is germinating from banality and everyday life, and ending with them (it is enough to recall how Sodaberg interpreted the biography of Che Guevara). In this sense, we all already live in the experimental Universe of Soderberg, simply not noticing how his former experiments with forms, genres and distribution schemes become commonplace.