Daniel Dickmeis

Paul Bacher is in crisis. If he could feel in the past as one of the most influential writers of his generation, he has long lacked ideas and impetus for a new great work. His reading tours are becoming more and more a sad affair with too much alcohol and too little public. Then Paul overflows in a drunken hitchhiker, flees first scared and later removes the body, without talking to anyone about the experience. But something is flowing in its interior. Paul starts to write again. The criticism is done, but the story about the death of a hitchhiker also arouses suspicion.

Newlyweds Hedda and Jorgen Tesman are just returning from their honeymoon to a villa by the edge of the forest with a breathtaking view on the city. Restoration work on their home has not yet been completed, and Jorgen will soon be running out of money. That's if he doesn't succeed Dr. Franck Brack as head physician of the city hospital. Jorgen and Hedda prepare dinner for Brack, when two uninvited guests emerge. As the evening progesses the group becomes entangled in a weave of guilt, love and betrayal and when morning comes disaster has struck.

Nine young actors leave behind their daily lives in Berlin and travel to the country to audition for a summer theatre production to be performed in the ruins of an old church. A once-renowned Swiss director is using this week of rehearsals to find the lead for this production of “Hamlet”. The director is staying privately at the home of an old woman, but the actors are being put up at a run-down hotel with very thin walls.

In the near-future, a woman whose robotic husband fails to meet her standards returns and upgrades him for a better version with standards that she now fails to meet.