Writer and Director: Angela Schanelec
With only a few slivers of hope, this German drama may be the most depressing film in this year’s BFI London Film Festival. Strange and sometimes fascinatingly banal, My Wife Cries examines the need for human connection among a group of 40-somethings who can only grasp their sense of identity through being loved by another.
Writer/Director Angela Schanelec’s characters seem deliberately German, even parodically. They speak in direct terms; they rarely smile, and their conversations are often carried on in a single, dry philosophical tone: “What could be worse than tiredness and sleep,” remarks one character.
Thomas’s crane has broken down, and as he waits in the site office, he talks to the two female workers there. Karen is going out with Valentin, a labourer on the site. Karen confides – although confides is not the correct word for personal information so matter-of-factly delivered – that Valentin gets frustrated with her because she never knows what she wants. Indeed, she wants nothing, she states blandly, but is happy to go along with whatever Valentin wants. Her colleague responds with her own story of not really liking it when her 16-year-old daughter, who lives with her father, comes to stay. Thomas talks about his wife’s new job at the kindergarten and the fact that he is too old for friends in a monotone.
Later he discovers that his wife, Carla, has been having an affair of sorts with a younger man she met at the dance class that she and Thomas used to attend together. When Thomas stopped going, Carla needed a partner, so she danced with Mark, a student at the university. But Mark is now dead; he died that afternoon in a car crash.
Carla recounts her story mostly objectively, telling Thomas the facts – even her emotions become hard-boiled facts -, not sparing him any detail. Her lack of empathy doesn’t appear to come from any form of neurodivergence, as everyone else in this film speaks just as plainly. In a subsequent scene, stunningly shot as post-rain sunshine streams into a room, Thomas recounts a story about a girlfriend he had at the age of 20. The tale is tragic, but he relates it so dispassionately that it is doubly tragic. His friends listen attentively but say not a word.
Apart from this scene, there is little beauty in the other shots, some exceedingly long. We see the drab working site, municipal parks where brass bands practice and the motorway where Mark was killed. Modern life has never looked so dull or so unrewarding. Schanelec’s characters cling to each other, as there is nothing else. Vladimir Vulevic’s Thomas says that his head is exploding when he hears his wife’s news, falling against a tree in a silent swoon. Agathe Bonitzer’s Carla pronounces that she would have chosen to die if anything bad had happened to Thomas when he was in the hospital, but the next day she gives him more merciless details about her attraction to Mark. She has no one else to talk to.
Perhaps there is hope in the unexpected choreographed dance to Leonard Cohen’s Lover Lover Lover. Or the chance of salvation in the poetry of a Nobel Prize contender that Carla reads while eating a pizza. But the last scene suggests that we are animals, gluttonous and wild.
My Wife Cries is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
