System Crasher

Watching _Systemsprenger_ / _System Crasher_ is like watching a monkey play with a box of live hand grenades in a maternity ward. You know what's going to happen, it's just a question of time. _System Crasher_ is aptly named because 1) it's about an 8-year-old girl with trauma who acts out so violently the German health care network has no place for her and 2) we, the viewer, hate her for her behavior yet can't hate her because of the abuse that caused it so our own systems crash. The film's not an easy watch, but that's because it's so well made and because the child actor Helena Zengel is a tour de force in the role of Benni. The biggest misstep is that _System Crasher_ starts out at an intensity of 11, so it has nowhere to go but straight, which, tragically, flattens the narrative arc.

This movie was recommended by my psychopathology professor when we studied Oppositional defiant disorder to observe the case and how difficult it was to watch the pain of Benni and everyone around her. This film invites us to be in her shoes, a child who has been through so much, who still wants her mother's love and care, who has no control over her own destiny within the system. Putting ourselves in the shoes of the mother who doesn't feel she has the means and resources to deal with her daughter's difficult case and in place of the workers of the system who dedicate their lives to helping these children, who suffer with the difficulties of their work and with purely human pains and whom I admire infinitely. It is difficult, raw, painful to watch how difficult, raw and painful it is to know that cases like this exist in real life and that the system, despite the efforts of its workers, is not prepared to deal with it.