Summer ‘04

An idyllic summer vacation is shattered in the sexually-charged thriller Summer ’04. Miriam and Andre, a seemingly happy couple, welcome their teenage son and his Lolita-like girlfriend to their cottage by the sea. When Miriam (Martina Gedeck from The Lives of Others) sees the young girl flirting with a mysterious older man, she becomes concerned for her safety and sets out to end their blossoming romance. But the closer she gets to the charismatic stranger, the more she finds herself drawn to him, triggering a volatile love triangle.

“A CLASSIC PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER! The methodically threaded and crossed high wires of tension are slowly, expertly tightened... Elements of L’Avventura, Swimming Pool, and even A Place in the Sun materialize in the film’s sophisticated layering.” – Michelle Orange, VILLAGE VOICE

“SEXY AND SMART! A first-rate cast and nail-on-the-head dialogue about materialism, hypocrisy, morality and mortality.” – Matt Zoller Seitz, NEW YORK TIMES

“MARVELOUS! A surprise ending amounts to one of the most heart-rendingly brilliant coups in directing, writing and acting I have ever experienced on the screen. Like only a few endings I can recall, it makes you rethink everything you have seen before.” – Andrew Sarris, NEW YORK OBSERVER

“QUITE A RIDE! A well-crafted and deceptively leisurely film, with a heart of ice.” – Andrew O’Hehir, SALON.COM

“SUMMER ‘04 WILL SURELY BE COMPARED TO THE FILMS OF CLAUDE CHABROL as its slow, insidious machinations build to a cynical ending implicating false bourgeois propriety, but it's also more than that. There’s something haunting and - to use a word no longer in fashion - existential in Krohmer’s patient, unrushed delivery, in his ability to trust his soundtrack-less images and create lived-in conditions for understated, complex performances. Summer '04 is as real as life.” – Michael Joshua Rowin, INDIEWIRE

“An astonishingly graduated portrayal by Martina Gedeck.” – Philip Lopate, FILM COMMENT

“A MASTERFUL AND ORIGINAL THRILLER that matches Rohmer’s vacationing plots with the paranoid and anxious underpinnings of Polanski, coming together in a noir-tinged story of desire, infidelity responsibility - and, of course, moral ambiguity.” – Cullen Gallagher, L MAGAZINE

“Unsettling... What’s most notable about Krohmer’s approach is his remarkable control of tone, perched as it is somewhere between restrained drama and deadpan comedy. Critic’s Pick.” – Logan Hill, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

“The film unfolds with cold, Chabrolian detachment and quietly builds to a coolly
satisfying denouement that leaves everyone involved - including the audience - second-guessing everything that's come before.” – Ken Fox, TV GUIDE’S MOVIE GUIDE

“REMARKABLE! A sunny noir tragicomedy conjoining early Roman Polanski (specifically, Knife in the Water) with early Eric Rohmer, punctuated by a surprise ending and laden with social criticism.” – Rex Roberts, FILM JOURNAL