2551.03 – The End

The end is near, but midnight cinema lives on with unbroken freshness and resilience in this feature-length film: With 2551.03 – The End, Norbert Pfaffenbichler concludes his transgressive dystopian trilogy in which truly splendid nightmares become horrific reality, and vice versa. Once again, the man in the monkey mask stumbles through the totalitarian underground world of the future in search of a lost child. Even though, for the benefit of new audiences, a short scrolling text at the beginning summarizes the plot of the two previous films, 2551.01 – The Kid and 2551.02 – Orgy of the Damned, everything is revealed wordlessly and without requiring prior knowledge. This (post-)modern silent film transports you to an unexpected and perverse wonderland, accompanied by a soundtrack of stunning industrial-electronic music.

After the orgiastic excesses of the second part, the protagonist’s unfortunate and confusing odyssey ends with a consistent punk ethos, as a nihilistic journey of dissolution through a world where everyone is masked, a realm ruled by sex and violence. It’s a dazzling, fantastical creation that nevertheless also creates an apt caricature of our present, characterized as it is by anonymous threats and open conflict.

And in the end, even the menacing stormtroopers of a mad Sun King are unable to tame the murderous chaos that astonishes, horrifies, and literally defies description. Pfaffenbichler and his team have once again succeeded in using minimal resources to set off a fireworks display of amazing effects and unexpected ideas, in which anything seems possible, from slapstick feasts to strobe-lit carnage. Between these two extremes, the journey in this unhinged no-budget blockbuster even leads into a region composed solely of film negatives. With taboo-breaking and psychedelic openness, the entire history of grotesque cinema is celebrated once more, from the altar of the now century-old expressionist horror to the late-night cult sites of Jodorowsky and Lynch to the eternal light of the comedy anarchists. And all of this in a genuine underground setting. Subversion is dead, long live subversion! (Christoph Huber)

Translation: John Wojtowicz

A masked apeman traverses a dystopian society in this twisted finale of Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s 2551 trilogy. Eerie locations, striking cinematography and a thundering industrial soundtrack form the backbone of this extreme kind of contemporary silent film that sits somewhere between experimental and underground.

The final entry to Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s infamous ‘2551 trilogy’ is a climactic send-off to the dystopian series. Traversing the uncanny valley between experimental art and pure underground trash, 2551’s fictional universe is one of decay, degradation and repression. Again, our hero is an unnamed and masked apeman, who traverses the nightmarish realms of a heavily militarised post-apocalyptic world in the search of a missing child. His quest drags him into the belly of the beast of a twisted society, marked by disturbing encounters with colourful and grotesque characters.

While shot on an extremely low budget, Pfaffenbichler manages to create an entirely convincing fictional universe that leans heavily on the expressionist silent horror films of almost a century ago. With its eerie locations, striking cinematography and thundering industrial soundtrack, 2551.03 – The End becomes a nightmarish kind of new silent film that completely pummels over you. This finale ends on a particularly high note, with some of the most expressive use of colours and textures Pfaffenbichler has put to film so far. 
(Hugo Emmerzael/ IFF Rotterdam, catalogue 2025)