East German marriage therapy: one farmhouse, two strangers, zero chill.
Three couples want to spend a short break together. Some have a traffic accident, the others are prevented professionally. So the designer Robert and the youth helper Ellen are forced to spend the days in a remote farmhouse alone with her young son. The previously suppressed marriage crisis breaks open. Allegations, confessions, charges, self-accusations are in the room. Painfully, they come to the realization that only their own happiness is responsible for their happiness. With the old landlord, each of them finds himself. In the end, Robert and Ellen want to try a new beginning.
Acting
Hoffmann and Mueller-Stahl weaponize every loaded silence.
Direction
Beyer turns a farmhouse into psychological pressure cooker.
Director
Frank Beyer
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Made in East Germany's DEFA studio, this quietly subverted socialist realist expectations by focusing on private bourgeois misery rather than collective triumph.
Jutta Hoffmann reportedly threw herself so completely into Ellen's breakdown that crew members couldn't distinguish performance from genuine distress.
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