When we watched Psycho, we were keeping a close eye on the cinematography, because that’s what we were studying in class. With Run Lola Run, it’s all about the editing. This is a film manages to be both simple and complex at the same time

Lola (Franka Potente) is a spunky, red haired woman who gets a call from her boyfriend Manni. (Moritz Bleibtreu) He owes money to some bad people and she has twenty minutes to get it for him. Simple, right? Well, much like a video game, when Lola fails to get the money, the film restarts to the beginning of her run. The film is separated into three ‘runs,’ which all start the same but end in vastly different ways.

As the trailer shows us, every second matters. Both in life, and in the film. This is not the kind of movie that you can walk away from to answer the phone and then come back. Every single thing that happens on screen is crucial to why the film works. As Lola runs, each person she bumps into goes on to live a vastly different life depending on how Lola bumps into them. And, having edited before, I can only imagine the daunting task editor Matthilde Bonnefoy had in front of her.

The brilliance of this film could not have been pulled off without everybody involved bringing their A – Game. The directing is brilliant. The writing is brilliant. The sound design is brilliant. And I would like to give a round of applause to Franka Potente, who must have gotten exhausted after all the running that she had to do, and she still pulls off an incredible performance.

I’ll be honest. I was originally going to give this movie 4 1/2 stars. But the more I think about it, I can’t think about anything wrong with this film. I don’t want to get in the habit of giving everything 5 stars, but hey. This is film studies and I doubt they’re going to show us bad films. A film that was sadly shut out of the Oscars, but deserves multiple viewings.

*****