‘My Wife Cries’ Berlinale Review: The Strange Geometry of Intimacy

Angela Schanelec’s cinema has long carried the reputation of being cryptic, hermetic, emotionally remote. Even her most celebrated films tend to operate through an austere, rigorously cerebral lens—one that privileges estrangement, discomfort, and a quietly pervasive sense of existential unease over anything resembling conventional emotional access. My Wife Cries, by contrast, may well be her most open, accessible, even disarmingly emotional work to date. Without betraying her aesthetic project, her formal discipline, or any of the recognizable traits that define her filmography, Schanelec has made a deeply sensitive film about the emotional distances that grow between people—distances that, once formed, seem to carve irreparable fissures into the fabric of shared lives.

Thomas (Vladimir Vulević) is a factory worker chatting with two colleagues during a break when he receives a call from Carla (Agathe Bonitzer), who has just been released from the hospital after an accident. Sitting together on a bench in a public square, he asks what happened. She breaks down in tears—uncontrollably, inconsolably. Later, during the long walk back to the house, she explains that she had stayed in touch with David from the dance class both of them used to attend, a class Thomas eventually abandoned. The two began a relationship that led them to travel together to buy a house. On that trip, however, they were involved in an accident: she survived unharmed; he died. The revelation leaves Thomas visibly shaken—so much so that he is eventually the one who ends up hospitalized, overcome by the shock of it all.

That conversation becomes the aperture through which everything else in the film begins to unfold—between them, but also among their coworkers, friends, and acquaintances. Other romantic encounters and misfires surface, anecdotes are exchanged, stories circulate. Everything exists within a quietly fractured emotional climate, as if something essential—love, trust, language itself, the possibility of making plans with another person—had irrevocably broken down. My Wife Cries gradually braids together these parallel romantic trajectories, morphing into something like a cubist take on an Eric Rohmer film: a constellation of young (and not-so-young) people perpetually crossing paths, missing connections, misreading signals, drifting in and out of relationships that no longer offer the reassurance they once promised.

Working with the spare number of shots that has become her signature (a colleague counted just 83 across the entire film), and with the bressonian performances that are integral to her style, Schanelec this time grants more temporal and narrative space to the stories and reflections of her small ensemble—most of them orbiting Thomas and Carla, many undergoing similarly destabilizing experiences of emotional disconnection. In between, there are luminous dance sequences (one set to the music of Leonard Cohen), bicycles gliding through the city, bands playing in public squares, people sleeping, and—above all—people thinking, trying to parse whatever existential dilemma has befallen them, whether it be the end of a relationship or the purchase of an absurdly expensive sofa.

As is customary in Schanelec’s work, the viewer is not offered an easy pathway for connecting the dots—her scripts often feel assembled from disjunctive fragments, a sensation reinforced by her staging. Yet My Wife Cries never becomes oppressive in its opacity; it doesn’t coerce the viewer into diagramming narrative lines or imposing dramatic continuity where there may be none. Beyond the comings and goings, the chance encounters and emotional stalemates, the film ultimately reveals itself as a kind of chronicle of the confusion born from romantic misalignment. It is, in essence, a film about solitude—and about the anguishing void that emerges when the person closest to us, whom we believed we knew intimately, suddenly becomes a mystery. Or perhaps always was one.