What is their home improvement paradise for some can be a place of horror for others.
Then the hardware store becomes a labyrinth and its aisles become deep gorges where the worst can be expected.
In Sebastian Ko's film "Geborgtes Weiß" a five-year-old disappears right at the beginning.
His mother lost sight of him for seconds when she was on the phone.
While she is slowly being seized by panic, her steps quicken, the camera follows her, circling her, looking around the corners, sometimes making the hardware store appear huge, then very narrow again.
Peter Korte
Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.
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The longer the scene lasts, and it lasts surprisingly long, the more the uneasiness is transferred to the cinema - until suddenly a friendly man holding the boy's hand stands in front of his mother as if nothing had happened.
This feeling of restlessness and fear, the guilty conscience of not having paid attention, creates the specific atmosphere of the film.
She will not budge even after light has shed on the dark spots and mysteries of the characters.
Thriller, family drama and parable in one
It is Sebastian Ko's third feature film, he is not a young director, but in his early 50s and has directed a number of "Tatort" episodes in recent years.
He came up with the idea for “Geborgtes Weiß” and Karin Kaçi wrote the screenplay.
The film can be understood as a thriller and family drama, but also as a parable.
That's not too important.
He shows a liberal, bourgeois milieu in which one does not ignore the injustices in the world, lets others share in the prosperity and wants to do them good with a mild paternalism that turns into condescension when the recipient lacks gratitude.
This is not an insanely original constellation, nor does it promise an overly filigree figure drawing.
But of course it helps when you get two of the best German actors for the leading roles, who simply cover up the constructed and schematic until you don't even notice it anymore.
Susanne Wolff, who works more in the theater than in the cinema, who received a German film award for her part in "Styx" in 2019, is Marta, the mother in the hardware store.
Marta is a doctor and has worked in Albania for two years.
She lives with her husband and child in a spacious old house in the countryside.
Ulrich Matthes is Roland, the much older husband;
he adopted the child that is not his, he is a writer with no financial worries.
Wolff and Matthes are good at suggesting the underlying tensions in the couple's superficially harmonious everyday life.
"I miss you," he says while she massages his neck.
"How so?
I'm here," she says simply.
They don't look at each other, only we look at their faces.
After the strong start of the film, the next irritation quickly follows: When Marta comes home from work, the man from the hardware store is there, he is supposed to renovate the bathroom.
The stranger, the third person, whose appearance brings unrest and conflict.
A familiar dramaturgical constellation.
His name is Valmir (florist Bajgora) and he comes from Albania.
Marta wants to get rid of him.
Her husband spontaneously invites him over when friends come over for dinner.
When Roland forces Marta to say a few Albanian sentences, Valmir translates them incorrectly.
She takes it like there's complicity, like she has a clue as to why this man appeared out of nowhere.
It can be revealed that he will blackmail her and put the couple's peaceful coexistence to the test.
It's like the stage of her life becomes an incline.
They're trying to keep their footing while they're slipping.
Anger and pain, courage to fight and despair alternate in Susanne Wolff's face.
The tension in her body leaves open whether she will freeze from fear or prepare to attack.
This Marta is ready for a lot for the child, even what one does not expect.
Ulrich Matthes is watched as he is overcome with disbelief that his orderly world is getting mixed up;
when he pulls himself together to defend them, the egalitarian philanthropist who gets drunk around the campfire with the handyman suddenly sharply marks the class difference.
Sebastian Ko's staging makes it clear early on that not one of those solutions that are usual in TV movies that ruin every good thriller is waiting for you.
An irreversible process is set in motion here.
The man from the Balkans only pushed him.
He didn't trigger it.
A little less strings on the soundtrack wouldn't have hurt though.
On the other hand, Andreas Köhler's camera is very eloquent.
She creates moments of threatening closeness or isolation in the moorland in which the house is located.
And Köhler subtly works with shifts in focus within individual shots.
Suddenly a perception blurs, or a clarity arises that the character and the audience in the cinema share with each other.
In the end, you understand what the title wants to tell you: the whiteness of innocence does not last for anyone involved in this story.