Sandra Hüller as Michaela in "Requiem."

On July 1, 1976, Anneliese Michel, 23. died at her home in Germany from the effects of weekly exorcisms performed upon her. The exorcisms were performed at her own request after years of treatment with psychotropic drugs for severe psychiatric disturbances failed to cure her; as her condition worsened, she began to believe she was possessed by demons. Raised a devout Catholic, she believed that exorcism was her only hope, and spent five years getting permission from the Church. After her death, her parents and the two exorcists were convicted of negligent homicide.

You may recognize this as the basis for the film The Exorcism of Emily Rose. The story is also the inspiration for the new German film Requiem, which does not claim to represent the facts of the story (it opens with the statement that though inspired by a true event, “the characters and their actions were freely imagined.”)

I mention the story of Anneliese Michel not to encourage you to draw comparisons but because the film was made for an audience that is expected to know about her. Director Hans-Christian Schmid and writer Bernd Lange are not interested in discussing or denying the existence of demons, or even of condemning the Church for archaic rituals. Rather, they saw the story as a vehicle in which to explore the extreme pressures faced by young people at a time of life when everything they do can have enormous implications for their lives.

Sandra Hüller stars as Michaela Klingler, the oldest child of parents who have raised her in a small German town. In 1971, she is 21 years old and insistent on going to university, something her parents have dissuaded her from doing because of her epilepsy.

The combination of Michaela’s devout (though not extreme) religious upbringing and comparative isolation make her an odd duck at college, where the students are enjoying the freedoms of the late 1960s. Determined to fit in, she makes friends and even a lover. But her inner pendulum swings back even further: Spurred by her rigid mother’s disapproval of Michaela’s new ways, her seizures start to be accompanied by demonic faces that mock and torment her.

Michaela is a young woman at war with herself, and the primary reason to see Requiem is for the performance of Huller, a stage-trained actress who resembles a younger, rawer Cate Blanchett. Director Schmid (who has made a specialty in Germany of films involving troubled youth and/or religious outsiders) employs a hand-held camera and naturalistic lighting and sets to focus attention on her, as if there were any chance that anything else in the film could compete. Audiences expecting standard horror fare will be disappointed to learn that the film ends before the trials that (directly or indirectly) caused her death. This is instead a horror film of a subtler, more unsettling kind.