Overview: Thomas (Marquard Bohm, Kings of the Road) gets a ride to Munich where he finds his ex-girlfriend Peggy (counter culture activist and model Uschi Obermaier) who takes him in. In her flat he finds Peggy and her roommates have a commune-like lifestyle where they kill the men in their lives after five days, but will Thomas realize in time?

Blu-ray Verdict: Holding back from the free-wheeling shoot-outs which made the Italian Crime genre so lively, (with a clever use of muffled sound effects for newspaper being used as a silencer) director Rudolf Thome and cinematographer Bernd Fiedler take aim with a off-beat, casual hippie atmosphere, with the ladies sorting out the next supply not in a seedy den, but a happening house.

Swinging very much to the sounds of the ’60s,Thome keeps the flick refreshingly playful by breaking the Crime tunes with splashes of kitsch free love and from out of left-field brightly coloured partying. Keeping to the beat of Thome’s style, the screenplay by Max Zihlmann wraps Thomas (played by a fittingly meek Marquard Bohm) and his relationships with the sexy women in a peculiar hazy mood, which subtly works as the women reveal to Thomas why they all stay somewhat disconnected in their romantic encounters, as they load up when the red sun sets.

In closing, the movie could have been better if there had been a few, homeopathically dosed scenes of ultragraphic violence, in my humble opinion, and as much as I liked the Thomas character (the movie is worth seeing for him alone), actor Marquard Bohm slurs his lines really badly sometimes.

That said, these are all oh-so minor grievances, for Red Sun (aka Rote Sonne) is a boldly outstanding, dystopia-fueled movie of the finest order, of that have no doubt.

Special Features:
High-definition digital transfer overseen by director Rudolf Thome
Select scene commentary with Thome and Rainer Langhans, Obermaier’s boyfriend and Kommune 1 member who served as inspiration for the film and was on set for the shoot
Rote Sonne between Pop Sensibility and Social Critique - A newly produced visual essay by scholar Johannes von Moltke on Red Sun, which looks at the social and cultural influences on the film and provides context for the era in which it was made (2022, 21 mins)
From Oberhausen to the Fall of the Wall: A visual essay by academic and programmer Margaret Deriaz tracing the development of the New German Cinema from the Oberhausen Manifesto to the fall of the Berlin wall (2023, 50 mins approx.)
Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters
Limited edition 52-page booklet featuring new writing on the film by Samm Deighan, newly translated archival letters by Wim Wenders, critic Enno Patalas and the German Film Evaluation Office on the film’s official submission, newly translated archival interview with Rudolf Thome and an overview reviews
Limited edition of 2000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of logos and markings