Rising High is a 2020 German comedy-drama film. This film is directed and written by Cuneyt Kaya. The storyline revolves around Viktor as David Kross, Gerry as Frederick Lau and Nicole as Janina Uhse, who have figured out a way to make money out of the property market in Berlin.
The new Netflix offering from Germany is slick and energetic. But even as a mostly less than-serious criminal caper. It has a distinctly second-hand fee. We’ve partied with more and less these same plucky. This is a competently crafted movie too shallow to come up with much reason why we should root for these people, and too derivative to make their vertiginous rise and fall more than forgettable formals entertainment
The film opens on a rowdy mansion party hosted by our millionaire hero, Viktor as David Kross. A baby-faced real estate mogul with a chip on his shoulder, he awakens, hungover, to a team of a policeman arresting him for evasion, money laundering, and fraud.
Such swaggering portraits of wealth often come with a question and Does it fetishize greed and condemn and Rising High doesn’t achieve either. There is a starling amorality to its treatment of women, particularly the sex workers that Viktor, Gerry, and Kaya’s camera frequently degrade. But other than its misogyny, the movie, stacked with try-hard hedonism, fails to provoke more than mild annoyance.
Still, the first half is cracking, Viktor arrives in Berlin with nothing but 200 euros and a nice suit, quickly realizing that it’s almost impossible to get a job park bench for the night in post-recession Germany.
Almost instantly turning to crime, he forges a paycheque and a corner shop photocopier and scams his way into a penthouse apartment. For such a carefully constructed movie It’s a shame to see it skimming so much surface whenever it has to deal with human emotions instead of legal loopholes, and things grow worse in the second half when Viktor starts getting romantically entangled with banker Nicole as Janina Uhse steering the movie further away from what it’ good at.
