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A teenage girl, Tina (Carolyn Genzkow), attends a rave-like party ripe with insanely loud dance music, drugs, and barely-dressed fellow teens. In the car on the way there, a friend has taken her photo and edited it together with that of a jarred fetus from biology class. At the party, a guy shows Tina video footage of a girl being struck by a car as she crouches in the street. While Tina’s buddies high-five the macabre find, Tina finds it as uncomfortable as the audience. “Pretty hardcore,” she tells the guy approvingly, but her expression disagrees.

Soon, the scene she watched on the phone becomes her own; she’s struck by a car when crouching in the road. But was she? Minutes later, she’s back on her feet, unharmed, with her friends saying she simply passed out. This is where Der Nachtmar’s (2015) cerebral experiment begins, and isn’t the last time we visit the scene.

It’s right after this experience that Tina starts seeing a small creature in her home. At first, we aren’t privy to this witness, having to take Tina’s word for the existence of whatever she sees. At the same time, the questioning begins: Is she just having a breakdown, or does this thing exist? When the homunculus is finally revealed—a gray, hunchbacked little beast that is an ugly lovechild of Harry Potter’s Dobby, Lord of the Rings’ Gollum, Basket Case’s Belial with a little of Mac and Me’s Mac thrown in—we still don’t know whether it’s really there or Tina is simply imagining it, and the film is just letting us in on her delusions.

One thing is for sure: he looks a lot like that jarred fetus she saw the night of her maybe-maybe not car accident.

Eventually, after much dismissal of Tina’s visions and the growing assumptions of insanity, other people witness the figure. They also seemingly interact with it, often violently, which Tina psychosomatically endures through a strangely symbiotic, stigmatic relationship with the beast. But even when others openly respond to the creature’s existence, it’s hard to be completely sure what they’re seeing is the same thing Tina (and the audience) sees. Worse, maybe they’re not seeing it all but responding to Tina’s madness, and we’re part of Tina’s Fight Club-esque slanted perspective of her surroundings.

Ben Nicholson of CineVue notes, “the audience must constantly decide what they believe to actually be happening. Akiz places them firmly within the perspective of Tina, and Clemens Baumeister tries keep the visuals disorientating.”

Der Nachtmahr is neither horror nor science fiction. It’s not quite a drama and doesn’t have the thrills to be a thriller. If anything, it’s an unconventional coming-of-age film about the teenage transition to adulthood and the need for acceptance and belonging in a word of dismissive social attitudes. The blind and grotesque creature seems most logically interpreted as a manifestation of Tina’s isolation and detachment from her social circle. After all, her friends do seem pretty uninterested in everything, including each other. The goblin is small, slow, helpless, and ugly—much the way teens fighting to understand their own being feel.

Matt Oakes at Silver Screen Riot isn’t sure we’re intended to understand exactly what Der Nachtmahr’s message is: “One can waffle back and forth over the intent of visual-artist-turned-director Akiz‘s vague but scalding narrative. Are we witness to a woman’s looming guilt over an unseen abortion? Are we on the frontlines of a schizophrenic onset? Or are we just privy to a long history of careless drug abuse taking its hallowed toll? On the other side of the fence, could everything we see indeed be real? The lingering questions may frustrate the more rigid, fact-seeking viewers but those willing to dig around within Akiz’s rich subtext are to be treated with something immaculately strange and inexplicably affecting. Like the best surrealist horrors, Der Nachtmahr feels no pressure to make you understand its off-kilter tango. Rather, it saunters up to our line of sanity and gladly tiptoes past.”

Amanda Waltz at The Film Stage agrees, saying the experience of the film is more important than understanding its message: “While AKIZ supplies plenty of formalist stimulation, he’s not so keen on providing any clues to the story’s ultimate meaning. He constructs a deliberately confusing, Donnie Darko-esque narrative strewn with more questions than answers. The conceit allows viewers to develop their own theories on whether or not the creature is real, Tina is alive or dead, or the whole thing is just a crazy dream, which will certainly prove frustrating for some. Much like Tina’s decision to embrace her freaky friend, it’s better to just accept the film for the bizarre curiosity that it is rather than examine its intentions.”

For those who need to comprehend the film, Akiz’s directorial efforts open up other avenues for debate. Take the film’s penultimate scene, for example, when Tina and the creature are surrounded by folks responding in horror to the sight of the figure by her side. A perfect symmetry of setting exists in the frame, and centered within is a bright red light, a la HAL 9000. Meanwhile, the title music from A Clockwork Orange (1972) plays as everyone looks on in horror. Certainly two Kubrickian references in one shot must be on purpose, but what do they mean? Randall Lotowycz at Think and Code wonders, “should we view Tina as a corrupted youth like Clockwork‘s droogs? Does the creature and its almost parasitic relationship with Tina represent a new form of life like the Star Child in 2001? Or is the film not suggesting any of those things at all? Dream logic, after all, often lacks any logic.”

If Der Nachtmahr is a journey towards self-acceptance, it’s a relatable road for anyone who has survived their teenage years. A monster is not an unreasonable metaphor for the anxiety and fear of social rejection adolescents endure, and Tina seeing herself as that monster may be what the film is about. If so, it’s a delightful twist on an old genre staple.

However, the film allows for speculation. There are pregnancy metaphors, near-death experiences, the possibility of a languished nightmare (it is the title, after all), ideas of purgatory, and the ever-present and oft-suggested possibility of mental illness.

A later scene in the film finds Tina in English class for the film’s sole English-language scene. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon plays Tina’s teacher, who asks the class for their interpretation of William Blake literature. Some students in the class respond by saying he’s writing about life; others, death. Tina offers neither explanation, proposing it’s about an intense emotion that has no definition, indicating her own loss of control over life. But that vagueness doesn’t provide any answers, and the power of the film lives in its oddity and ambiguity.

Der Nachtmahr’s ending doubles-back to the opening car crash and offers yet another interpretation of the event. The final shot is puzzling—the cerebral type that lingers in the back of the viewer’s mind inviting ongoing analysis.

It seems Akiz intends Der Nachtmahr to be the first in a three-part library known as The Demonic Trilogy, dealing with “birth, love, and death.” If that’s the case, perhaps we need to wait for him to paint the full picture before it’s possible to attempt much understanding of all the strokes involved.