Katie goes to find Oliver’s house in Rotenburg, which is not far from where the Brothers Grimm wrote those tales that filled our childhood nightmares with monsters and cannibals. Oliver was left with an overbearing mother when the father moved out, then bullied at school and finding solace in an imaginary friend ‘Franky’. She studies the men’s childhoods: Simon was smitten by guilt about his mother’s suicide after she was told he was “playing doctor” with another boy. “It’s natural to wonder what separates us from them. “Why them and not us?” she wonders to her friends. Sitting in the lecture theatre, the professor announces that “many cannibals have been diagnosed with schizophrenia” – but the sanity defence is too glib for her.

Yes, cannibals can surely do that.Īnyway, Katie chooses to research the notorious German cannibal Oliver Hartwin (based on Meiwes) and his dead lover Simon Grombeck (based on Brandes), who had volunteered to let Oliver murder and eat him, an obsession that haunted him his whole life. She wants (and dreams of) “someone who can see inside of you”. Same – but I use chips (“fries” for my American readers). Well, Katie feels that she is “searching for something to fill that dark hole inside of her”. Why would someone study cannibalism for a PhD thesis (I ask myself that every time I apply for an extension to my submission date).

Katie is an American studying criminal psychology, who finds herself inexplicably drawn to an uncanny murder case for her thesis. The movie seems to need a narrator, so it makes up a fictional PhD student, Katie Armstrong (Keri Russell, who was also a student in Felicity, but a Russian spy in The Americans). This film is not a documentary but a fictional retelling of Meiwes’ story, with the names changed, to protect whom – the non-existent? It was also retold in a more light-hearted way in the first episode of the Australian television show Rake. The Meiwes case was covered in somewhat sensational terms (they kept comparing him to Hannibal Lecter, which was patently absurd) in this “ copycat killers” documentary. The only reply that seemed sincere was from a man named Jürgen Brandes, who was not really well-built or 18-30, but hey, eaters can’t be choosers. He advertised in 2001 on a fetish website called The Cannibal Café for “ a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed”. Meiwes was a German computer technician who was into “vorephilia” (sexual attraction to eating, or being eaten by, another human). You may remember Armin Meiwes (pronounced like the Sinatra song “I did it Meiwes”).

Armin meiwes video leaked