Garm
After a chance encounter with a mysterious woman, Christian brings a stray dog home to his girlfriend Lina. What first seems like an act of compassion soon turns into a menace, threatening their relationship, Lina’s sanity, and ultimately her life.
Christian and Lina live together in an increasingly strained intimacy, caught between emotional dependence and growing distance. The arrival of a stray dog shifts the balance between them: for Lina, it opens a new creative and emotional outlet; for Christian, it becomes an oppressive and disturbing force. As their conflict escalates, the animal reveals itself as the embodiment of everything festering beneath the surface.
Director's note
Fear of the unknown is a recurring theme in genre cinema, often embodied by monsters or ghosts — figures that represent the unfamiliar and uncontrollable. At first glance, dogs seem to fall outside that pattern. They are our everyday companions, loyal and familiar. Yet they also carry something instinctive and animalistic that can never be fully controlled. In mythology, it is no coincidence that the underworld — a realm of hidden forces and dark emotions — is so often guarded by dogs such as Cerberus or Garm. Christian’s fear of dogs may appear banal at first, but its roots lie deeper: it is ultimately a fear of losing control. In Garm, the dog becomes a symptom of a more fundamental anxiety — the fear of the unknown, of one’s own drives and emotions, and of the animalistic forces that resist rational control.
Producer's note
What draws us to Garm is the way it transforms an intimate emotional conflict into psychological genre cinema. While Matthias Kreter’s feature debut Ein Abend im Dezember is not a horror film, it already reveals the thematic core that also drives Garm: fear, loss of control, and the emotional damage caused by inner states that can no longer be contained. We have known and accompanied Matthias’s work since our time studying together and have followed his development from his earliest short films onward. What sets him apart is his exceptional work with actors and his ability to turn inner conflict into precise, unsettling cinematic form. For us, Garm is the chance to realize a bold elevated genre film with genuine emotional depth and a director whose voice we know deeply and trust completely.
Biography
Nicolas Kronauer, holding a vocational diploma in media production, specialized in production during his film studies at Darmstadt University, graduating with a BA. With experience as a Junior Producer in Berlin, he became Fourmat Film‘s executive producer in 2017, managing projects from concept to final cut, and handling financing and organization. He also served as the young talent section leader at the Producers‘ Association from 2021 to 2023 and teaches at Darmstadt University.
Filmography
2022-2024 December Evening (dir. Matthias Kreter) feature film
2019-2022 The Expert at the Card Table (dir. Hans-Joachim Brucherseifer) documentary fiction
2022 Chaos and Silence (Anatol Schuster) feature film