Gripping story with well-crafted characters

Disturbing yet enthralling

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

"Das große Museum" is an Austrian 95-minute film from 2014, so still relatively new. It is mostly in the German language and the most known career effort at this point by writer and director Johannes Holzhausen. They went with the approach of not including a narrator, so most of the time it is a very silent film and it lives from the visual side. Occasionally you hear the people in it, the staff of The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna talk, but that's really all you will be hearing. Unless you make the mistake to go for a version that was made for Austrian television and has a female narrator say everything you see. It's okay for the blind, but if you can see, you really don't wanna go for that one.The film tells us about work at the museum I just mentioned. This includes watching the budget when buying new exhibits, testing the alarm system, discussing which exhibits to put where, rooms being restored and all kinds of other aspects. This not a film that will get you interested in the world of art, paintings or sculptures. It will not sparkle your interest from 0% upwards. Like with most other films and forms of entertainment, you will need an advance interest to really enjoy this insight into the life of a museum employee. It maybe also helps if you have seen the Vienna museum live already or if you work in a museum yourself or study something in that direction. But I will not let my personal bias drag down my rating here as the execution is competent overall and the film really does exactly as you would expect from the title. For me personally, it is not near the best films or even documentaries from 2017, but I can see people with a different area of interest pretty much enjoying the hell out of the watch here. This is why overall I give "The Great Museum" a thumbs-up here. Worth checking out, even if I am not too enthusiastic about. Then again, the dry subject and fact-based, almost sobering, execution makes it difficult to really feel something during these 1.5 hours.

Unfortunately there are no subtitles - so if you don't speak or understand Austrian you must just watch this for the interior look of this mammoth museum.If you are really interested - (as I was in certain parts) - what the people are actually saying is unnecessary because you can understand whats happening by just seeing what they are doing. Such as in the art restoration. But mostly you are left wondering.For me personally the most interesting part of this documentary was at the very end as the camera pans through the ancient works tucked away in storage - certainly the most beautiful objects - and then the final scene of Tower of Babel by Brugel, and it's implied message of 'this too shall pass'.

Did you ever want to pull on an invisibility cloak and creep into the inner workings of a big museum? This film allows you to do so. A documentary without a single voice over we watch somebody to hack the ancient parquet floor into pieces and only later learn that a part of the museum rooms are severely redecorated when the director of the museum shows around the visiting director of the British Museum in the half-finished new rooms. Bring some patience when watching two ladies switching around the hanging order of some portraits again and again – I for once need to be in the right mood for this kind of movie. But when I am, it is a great experience. Still not sure if this film is for you? Check out the trailer, it gives a good feel for the movie.