Berlin Film Review: ‘The Real Estate’

There surely won’t be an uglier movie in the Berlin competition this year than “The Real Estate,” nor one so deeply unpleasant on every level.

Whether it’s the tediously coarse characters, some of whom appear to have been poached from a Swedish “Twin Peaks” knock-off, the deliberately unattractive lensing that makes you gasp for air, or simply the absence of any remotely genuine statement, this patience-tester about a hard-living dame inheriting an apartment building feels like the sort of thing cobbled together in a hash-induced haze by a couple of homeboys with nothing to say.

The fact that co-directors Axel Petersén (“Avalon”) and Måns Månsson (“The Yard”) made accomplished films before now is even more perplexing, as is the head-scratching discovery that “The Real Estate” somehow made it through multiple film labs.

It’ll be easier to offload a fire-damaged tenement in Trenton than find buyers for this misguided housing project.Can it really

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