The Reel Review
On the one-year anniversary of her brother’s tragic, fatal car accident, a young waitress in the Austrian ski resort town of Kitzbühel infiltrates a group of rich teenagers from Munich during their annual holiday to exact her elaborate plan of revenge, in this Netflix mystery/thriller.
Set in the gorgeous Austrian Alps, the six episode, German language crime drama starts off as a thinly-veiled exercise in class warfare between the working class against the über rich, with the look and feel of fun, mindless, trash TV. Imagine a soapy mashup of Mean Girls with the TV series Revenge. (Where is Madeline Stowe when you need her?!) The visuals of Kitzbühel are also a nice touch. Party! Party!
But predictably, our protagonist falls for the boyfriend of the target of her revenge, and the threadbare plot quickly devolves into a mind-numbingly dull, young adult melodrama. Despite that, its star, Sofie Eifertinger, has a winsome charm reminiscent of a young Laura Linney, and Valerie Huber’s Baroness Vanessa con Höhenfeldt is just the right amount of chic rich bitch that watching her demise is a delight, at least until the twisty series limps to a not so satisfying finalé.
REEL FACTS
• Kitz was filmed in Kitzbühel, Austria and Munich, Germany.
• Although only 26, German-born Sofie Eifertinger, who was born on New Year’s Day in 1996, has been acting since her 2012 debut in the TV series Schafkopf.
• Austrian-born Valerie Huber, born just three days after Eifertinger, was the 2014 Miss Earth Austria.
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