Hardly a harbinger of the vigorous and vibrant cinema he’d go on to create, Tom Tykwer’s 1994 feature-length debut evinces few of his characteristic directorial flourishes. Instead of the frenetic kineticism and temporal torsion of Lola rennt/Run Lola Run or the languid, expansive splendor of Heaven, Tykwer’s first is a dowdy, claustrophobic, stiflingly static film. Which is precisely the point. Stained in a murky sepiatone, his close-ups, ærial shots, and skewed angles follow hausfrau Maria (Nina Petri) with a stalker’s intensity. Her life is one of cloistered servitude, a deadened subservience to an abusive paralytic father and the unloving husband he forced upon her. She breaks this soul-crushing monotony by hoarding a keepsake box of houseflies and drafting confessional missives to a slender tribal statuette.

One day, however, a furtive assignation with a tremulous neighbor whom she’s watched silently for months becomes an epiphanic moment that awakens her to her true extrasensory capacities. This in turn gives rise to a mounting series of peculiar occurrences that lead to a perplexing dénouement. Petri’s somnambulant performance has a chilling intensity, and if the stylistic hallmarks of Tykwer’s later work aren’t much in evidence here, her Maria is an early instance of one of his favorite themes: the afflicted woman who by tapping into previously unrealized powers is able to bring about a twisted redemption. In German with English subtitles. (106 minutes)