 Day 3, System Crashers, suggested by Sebastian, aka I Am The Sword. No gimmick this time. I've said many times that I don't like watching movie trailers, but that's not entirely true. I just don't like watching them before I've seen the movie they're promoting. I actually really like to watch trailers after the fact because I like to see how things are marketed. Who did the distributor think this was for and what did they think was the best way to get those people into the theater? It's always at least oversimplified and sometimes straight up misleading, but it says a lot. And sometimes the thing that it says is that the people in charge have no idea how to market it. Case in point, System Crashers. You can feel how badly the trailer's editors wanted to fit the movie into a box, and for the first two thirds it does. The troubled nine-year-old girl who gets saved by a caring man who brings her into the woods to get away from it all, so heartwarming, etc. But the dream gets ripped from them as it does from the movie, as it does in life, because it's just not that easy. A system sprang or System Crashers is a person whose needs are too great for the social safety net. Ours is Benny, a nine-year-old girl who is visually striking for her lack of eyebrows and physically striking for the fact that she violently attacks people, especially if they touch her face, which is a serious trigger for her even younger childhood trauma. She's been in and out of group houses, and word has gotten round, so no one else wants to put her up. And I say want, but also she literally grabs a knife and threatens to kill someone, and then herself, if they bring her to school, so like, you can't really have a person like that in your group home around a bunch of other kids. You can't really have a person like that anywhere, but also she's fucking nine. You can't put her away forever as a completely over it man from the first group home we see her kicked out of laments. So what do you do with a problem like Benny? Writer-director Nora Finchide made a huge gamble resting the success of her film on a performance by a literal 10-year-old. Benny is a deeply complicated character, the type that if you saw a veteran actor play you'd call a wards bait, and Helena Zangle, again barely double digits, gives a stunning performance. She has to. That performance is everything. Benny must be a terror because we know that people are literally afraid of her and we need to understand why they have every right to be, but we need to see the other side of her, the one that her caseworker believes in when she tries so fucking hard to do something for her. The moments of happiness, of caring, of love, when we're reminded that she's just a kid, and because we do see the extremes in the moments in between it hurts so much more when inevitably her worst instincts take over. Others in the film see those same moments and start to develop savior fantasies. Benny's school escort, Micha, the caring man who brings her into the woods I mentioned before, sees the good in her and thinks that he can fix what's broken because that's what people do. We want to fix things, especially if they can't be fixed. And people can't just get fixed. And that doesn't mean you should accept a person's worst behaviors as inevitable, but at the same time she's a child. What is a nine-year-old who is clearly abused and madly adores a mother who she intellectually understands doesn't really like her, but cannot emotionally process that reality? I'm gonna do. If Benny were to suddenly just get better because someone was nice to her, she spent a couple weeks away from the internet, it would diminish the seriousness of her condition in a way that I was constantly on edge about. I didn't know if the film was going to magically make her trauma go away because the right person said the right thing. That happens so fucking often in media, and it is incredibly frustrating for someone who suffers from mental illness. This shit's complicated. And System Crashers is laser focused on that complication. That's why it's called that. It's not called Benny because the bigger picture isn't about Benny, but with the existence of people like her means for everyone else and for the system that cannot handle her. Something rubbed me the wrong way about the name, though, and it took me a while to understand why. There's the obvious. System Crashers is definitely some dude's alias in a cyberpunk story, but like what else do you call it? That is the literal translation. I asked someone who works with organizations that help children in the foster system and beyond if she'd ever heard of a term like it in the States. Her response? Not sure we have enough of a system to crash. And suddenly it made sense. System Crashers feels deeply foreign in a way that many films don't because it is predicated on the existence of a society that cares about the people in difficult circumstances. I don't know if it's actually true that every single abandoned child in Germany really gets an entire boardroom of people who talk through their case and all of the work that we see get put into Benny, but I sure as fuck know that sort of true individualized care isn't happening here on any meaningful scale. The last two years have laid bare how weak our system is and it's only getting worse, which ironically makes System Crashers a film ostensibly about the holes in a country's system feel aspirational. If only our problems were so specific. 8.0 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching and thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hammer and Marco, Kat Saracada, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I am the sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindy's, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, great. If you want to see more, there are suggestions in the comments, the explanations there. I don't know, we've got 27 more of these. Let's keep it rolling. I hope to see you in the next one.