Schramm

• Schramm opens with a quote from real-life American serial killer Carl Panzram (executed 1930) and draws loosely on criminology profiles of documented killers rather than one true case — though the title character's press nickname, the "Lipstick Killer," invites confusion with the real 1940s Chicago murderer of the same name.
• Franz Rodenkirchen, a longtime Buttgereit collaborator, co-wrote the screenplay with the director — Buttgereit directed solo — shaping the film's fractured, non-chronological structure of hallucinatory flashbacks.
• Buttgereit again cast largely non-professional actors from Berlin's underground scene, including Florian Koerner von Gustorf in the lead role of Lothar Schramm.
• Leading lady Monika M., who plays Schramm's neighbor Marianne, had already starred in Buttgereit's Nekromantik 2 (1991) after co-writer Franz Rodenkirchen spotted her by chance in a Berlin movie theater.
• Schramm is often described as capping Buttgereit's loose "death trilogy" alongside Nekromantik (1987), though critics differ on whether Der Todesking (1990) or Nekromantik 2 (1991) is the true middle entry.

The entire film is a deathbed hallucination looping through Schramm's guilt and desire. The repeated imagery of the closet, the cross, and the neighbor all represent fragmented memories reassembling as his brain shuts down, which explains the non-linear structure and why certain scenes contradict each other temporally.

Schramm is a direct response to the serial killer media landscape of the early 1990s. Buttgereit deliberately constructs a killer with no mystique, no charisma, and no audience, satirizing the celebrity industrial complex that surrounded figures like Dahmer and Bundy by giving us a murderer nobody notices or cares about.

The neighbor Marianne is not a real person but a projection of Schramm's remaining humanity, a figment who represents the normal life he cannot access. Her presence becomes more frequent as his mental state deteriorates, suggesting she is not a neighbor at all but the last gasp of his conscience trying to prevent the final act.

Lothar Schramm, a polite, unassuming Berlin cab driver dubbed the "Lipstick Killer" by the press, is dying on his apartment floor after a fall from a ladder while painting over bloodstains on the wall. As he bleeds out, the film rewinds through fragments of his final days: his infatuation with Marianne, the young prostitute who lives next door, whom he chauffeurs to a client's villa and later drugs, strips, and photographs back at his flat; his murder of two Jehovah's Witnesses who show up preaching at his door, whose bodies he poses and photographs; and a string of hallucinations and acts of self-mutilation, including a vision of his own leg torn off. Buttgereit's portrait of a nobody serial killer is grimy, pitiless, and weirdly tender.