Mike is 18 and isn‘t leaving his room anymore. What other teens do for days is something Mike has been doing for weeks. He sneaks out to go to the bathroom and to eat what his mother has prepared for him, but other than that he has broken contact with the outside world. His parents (Bibiana Beglau, Bjarne Mädel) and sister Mirir (Emma Bading) have tried everything: begging, crying, threats, and they are now helplessly standing in front of the shut door. They try to keep their routine, say that Mike is staying abroad to explain his absence, but the emotional chaos of the cornered family needs some release.

The hitherto exemplary middle-class parents break out in different ways. The father steeps himself into his work while the mother looks for erotic adventures. Whether you find the developments the characters go through believable is up to you. The fact that the father works with patients that have locked-in syndrome does seem very engineered, and the mirror image of the situation isn‘t taken any further. Even though both parents start acting strange, there‘s a sense of stagnation and rigidiy, a real change doesn‘t happen.

Isabel Prahl has made a kind of family constellation with the absent son and brother as the turning point and the crux in her first feature-length film. The other family members deal with their own issues in front of his closed door. Everyone is alone, a family bond isn‘t felt in the present or in the past. Unfortunately, Prahl doesn‘t do much with the promising situation, viewers don‘t get close to the characters, and the absent Mike remains a blank space.

Susanne Stern

Translation: Elinor Lewy