Film · 1974 · Films · 1970s
Fear Eats the Soul
Scored from 65 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Emmi Kurowski, a widowed German cleaning woman in her sixties, ducks into a Munich bar out of the rain and dances with Ali, a Moroccan guest worker roughly half her age; within days he has moved in and they marry. Her grown children, the neighbours in her tenement and the grocer on the corner answer with disgust and silence, and the couple's private tenderness starts to buckle under the pressure of being stared at. Rainer Werner Fassbinder shot the melodrama in about a fortnight, modelling it on Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows and framing his characters in doorways and mirrors as objects of other people's looking. Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem play the couple.
Fear Eats the Soul (1974) is a film IMDb files under the drama and romance genres. The runtime is 92 minutes. It was made in Germany. Its listed language is German.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 2,405 1970s films, not against the whole corpus. Only 65 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 67 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Fear Eats the Soul lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1970s (2,406 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 65.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
