Deep into the second week of another tumultuous (and freezing cold) year at the Berlin Film Festival, Angela Schanelec arrives with a welcome reminder of what summertime in the city feels like: a place where young people meet and chat and go for bike rides; a place where the uniform black and greys of winter outfits are exchanged for springtime hues; and a place where the relaxed stillness of a day can be punctured here and there by music or drama. In this milieu, Schanelec weaves a series of characters and conversations using dialogue that sounds dry, even stilted at times, but also often gives way to moments of real poetry and emotion.
That approach is most apparent in a couple of lovely, drawn-out walk-and-talks in two of the city’s leafiest public spaces. The first comes early on when a crane operator named Thomas (Vladimir Vulević) picks up his wife, Carla (Agathe Bonitzer), from the hospital. He soon learns that she’s just been in a car crash and that a friend of hers (with whom she may have been in the early throes of an affair) has died, yet the mood is nothing if not casual—even when an ambulance is called after Thomas stops to say that his head is about to explode. (This disarming and fascinating evenness of tone is foregrounded in the opening scene, in which Thomas chats to two female co-workers in the office of his building site.) In the film’s other sylvan stroll, which comes a little later on, Carla walks with a friend along the periphery of the Tiergarten until a brass band—and, serendipitously, a downpour—stops the movie in its tracks.
Those who’ve come to know Schanalec’s work over the last few years will likely recognize these rhythms and soon ease into this film’s steady stream of ideas. Or perhaps not. I’ll admit, as one who was mesmerized by the director’s 2019 film, I Was at Home… But, to finding her increasing abstractions a little too studied. Watching My Wife Cries, I was occasionally reminded of a Richard Brody line about Past Lives being a film “of A students, by A students, for A students”—the product of an artist “too accustomed to analyzing works for their structure.” It’s obviously reductive to say the same thing is going on here, but the depictions of Thomas’ workplace at the beginning and end, in particular, struck me as a little too stylized for comfort—to the point of coming off a little patronizing.
Those two sequences bookend what is otherwise an aesthetically and intellectually stimulating movie that asks for just 94 minutes of your day and rarely, if ever, demands strenuous attention. In its sporadically effective attempts to elevate moments of banality, it’s the kind of movie that will appeal to cinephiles of a Rohmerian or Hongian inclination, though I think it might lack a key ingredient that makes those movies so pleasurable: a desire to want to hang out with the people on screen, even the less-appealing ones. Whatever the case, I will not be surprised to see My Wife Cries on some of my colleagues’ year-end lists, and I look forward to reading what they write on it. When it comes to film festivals, sometimes that’s what it’s all about.
My Wife Cries premiered at the 2026 Berlinale.