‘Home Stories’ Berlinale Review: The Limits of a Ready-Made Narrative

The English title does a fairly good job of signaling what kind of film Home Stories wants to be. Eva Trobisch’s latest feature may appear to hinge on a clear narrative axis, but ultimately uses that premise as a pretext to sketch the intricate emotional topography of a family undergoing multiple, overlapping crises. The initial dramatic engine belongs to Lea (Frida Hornemann), the teenage daughter of Matze (Max Riemelt) and Rieke (Gina Henkel), who has been signed up for a televised singing competition in the mold of The Voice and is about to audition in front of millions. But the film’s concerns extend well beyond the mechanics of the contest itself.

What truly sets the drama in motion are the seemingly innocuous questions Lea faces from the show’s interviewers—about her life, her personality, who she is, how she defines herself. She struggles to articulate any of it, and the reasons gradually come into focus. Programs like this require narrative scaffolding: a compelling backstory, a digestible emotional arc that can be packaged for viewers. Lea doesn’t quite have one. It’s not that her family life is overtly chaotic—nothing in this discreet, low-key drama ever tips into full-blown disorder—but it is a shifting mosaic of personalities and unresolved tensions.

As Lea prepares to perform that modern talent-show staple, Fix You by Coldplay, the family’s various internal negotiations begin to revolve—at least in part—around presenting a coherent image for television. Not an easy task. Matze and Rieke are separating after her pregnancy with another man; Lea’s grandparents run a countryside hotel that’s on the brink of bankruptcy (their own relationship far from stable); her aunt Kati (Eva Löbau), who curates a museum dedicated to East German history, finds herself entangled in political controversy; and her best friend Bonny (Ida Fischer), with whom she usually sings at parties and in bars, seems quietly unsettled by Lea’s sudden rise.

These narrative threads drift in and out of focus as Trobisch initially appears to anchor the film in the televised competition, only to sideline it in favor of minor familial tensions—most of which never quite reach what one might call dramatic intensity. The most compelling material emerges from the evolving dynamic between Lea’s parents, who, despite their separation, reconnect in unexpected ways while accompanying their daughter through the prospect of sudden visibility. The remaining subplots are considerably less textured than the film seems to believe.

There is an intriguing conceptual angle that Home Stories only partially explores: the ways in which people narrativize themselves—on social media, in their public-facing identities, and here, in the process of crafting Lea’s personal story for television. A contestant in a show like this must, it seems, possess a strong, ready-made narrative. Perhaps that narrative matters more than talent itself. Lea finds it difficult to process, let alone verbalize: her life resists clean storytelling, shaped instead by the diffuse confusion of adolescence and the quiet instability of her family environment.

Dramatically, Home Stories rarely builds toward anything substantial. It plays more like a curated assemblage of scenes, conversations, and low-stakes confrontations that ripple softly across this extended family network. At 112 minutes, the film begins to feel overstretched—particularly once it becomes clear that the singing competition has slipped not into the background, but into tertiary relevance. There is rich material embedded in Lea’s domestic reality, but the director of Ivo presents it with such studied elegance and restraint that very little emotional vibration reaches the viewer. For a film that isn’t overtly experimental nor explicitly courting detachment, this lack of lived-in texture—of breath, of friction, of affect—ultimately flattens even its most promising ideas.