‘Phantoms of July’ Review: A Playful Meditation on Labor, History, and Survival

German filmmaker Julian Radlmaier has developed a distinctive tonal register where humor, lucidity, and political awareness coexist in deceptively light, offbeat narratives. His films often smuggle ideological concerns into stories that feel casual, even whimsical, built around unlikely turns and a faintly absurdist logic. As in Bloodsuckers: A Marxist Vampire Comedy, his latest feature, Phantoms of July, operates on that same dual frequency—balancing realism and fantasy, oscillating between deadpan ridicule and absolute seriousness in its treatment of characters and their tragicomic misadventures.

The film unfolds in the small German town of Sangerhausen, a place whose long and layered history seems to echo—sometimes faintly, sometimes more forcefully—into the present. The opening segment is set in the late 18th century, where a working-class young woman named Lotte (Paula Schindler) decides to flee with her partner to France, drawn by the revolutionary promise of a country “where they cut off the heads of the rich.” The escape, predictably, doesn’t go as planned—but Radlmaier refuses to develop the episode in conventional narrative terms, abruptly abandoning it and jumping forward to the same town in contemporary times.

The second—and longest—section centers on Ursula (Clara Schwinning), another working-class woman. She cleans at a furniture store and later works as a waitress in a bar where her boss berates her for arriving late. A young mother, Ursula becomes entangled with a group of traveling musicians who stop in town to perform and end up at her workplace. What follows is a loose, observational drift through Sangerhausen: walks, conversations, fragments of stories, and a tentative emotional connection with one of the performers.

From there, the narrative shifts again, this time to Neda (Maral Keshavarz), an Iranian-born travel influencer moving across Germany with her camera and tripod, documenting sites she deems worth sharing with her followers. Her path intersects with Sung-Nam (Kyung-Taek Lie), a Korean tour bus driver who, accompanied by a somewhat enigmatic child, takes her on a curiously improvised journey through the town and its surroundings.

These seemingly disparate threads are held together by a network of coincidences, chance encounters, dreams, and inexplicable phenomena. Strange stones appear; flowerpots fall without warning; both Ursula and Neda experience vivid, almost prophetic dreams involving people close to them. At one point, a pair of bizarre travelers wander naked through the town. Running beneath all this is a more grounded tension: a subtly hostile atmosphere toward immigrants that surfaces intermittently, unsettling several of the film’s protagonists.

Within Radlmaier’s gently absurdist universe, what ultimately emerges is something close to a celebration of working-class resilience across time. Without ever becoming overtly didactic, the film traces a shared condition linking Lotte, Ursula, and Neda: all three are subject to pressures exerted by employers, institutions, and even a quietly menacing police presence that hovers at the edges of the frame. Their connection—whether literal or imagined—forms through this common struggle for survival. Notably, this may be one of the rare films to feature an influencer as a central character without resorting to mockery or condescension.

Still, beyond its thematic undercurrents, Sehnsucht in Sangerhausen ultimately plays like a cinematic game—an airy, lightly fantastical exercise in narrative freedom. Its structure, built on lateral movements and seemingly arbitrary connections, recalls the work of Alexander Koberidze, particularly in the way events accumulate with a sense of intuitive rather than causal logic. Shot on grainy 16mm by Faraz Fesharaki—who also collaborated with Koberidze on What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?—Radlmaier’s film is breezy and unforced, yet formally daring. It can jump from a crude, close-up gag to a moment of quiet fantasy, then pivot again into something unexpectedly romantic. That freedom—tonal, structural, and visual—defines the cinema of one of Germany’s most idiosyncratic contemporary filmmakers.