Hard Feelings (2023). Netflix Movie. Review: Just Another High School Comedy

Hard Feelings is a comedy German movie directed by Granz Henman, starring Axel Stein and Diana Amft

If the first one (Harte Jungs) was already successful, this second part continues to play the same game: a German high school comedy with sexuality as its main theme.

If we accuse American films of lacking subtlety, it seems that this German production, which uses the quintessential American formula of teenagers overflowing with sexuality, offers, at least, existential insights in the same degree.

You only have to see a couple of shots to decide if you want to see it, in that it is sincere: a pool, a female butt in bikini and oily male abs of boys thirsting it like jerks.

Plot

Two best friends try to make it through high school while dealing with awkward new urges and their feelings for each other.

Movie Review

In a high school movie there is little to invent, and it is already known that the genre has been repeating itself unfailingly since that moment in which each one reached puberty and found in these films a somewhat naughty way of achieving a certain Bergmanian identification in the vein of Persona with the protagonists.

In short, either you’re young or you want to remember that time of your life, or maybe you are rather fussy and say that all of them are kind of bad (instead of directly using the word “trash”). There are bad ones and less bad ones, with more or less references to the reproductive organs… Hard Feelings, is not of the kind that makes few references to what is down there, and it isn’t one of the nicest or with the best scripts, and it isn’t by far the most stylized.

It is rather a provocative German production about high school that, without much subtlety (and with many references to what we’ve already mentioned) tries to make us have an entertaining and somewhat embarrassing time talking constantly about sexuality not entirely repressed, but without managing to be a movie “for grown-ups” at all. It is a rather naughty movie that, at this point, remains more retro than daring, more routine than groundbreaking.

Nice? Yes, up to a point. Nice if you want to laugh for an hour and a half about the same joke (which is not bad either, let’s see if they legalize certain substances). If you’re looking for elegance and the kind of sophistication that you can only find… Well, in many places, but don’t look for it here, it’s not the place.

A simple comedy of teenagers, routinary, nice and badass.

There are thousands like it.

One more.