Ghosts (Gespenster in the German original) is the film Christian Petzold made between Wolfsburg and the one that bounced him more into the international spotlight, Yella.
It’s the second of his Ghosts trilogy – Die innere Sicherheit (aka The State I’m In) and Yella are the other two – and like Die innere Sicherheit stars Julia Hummer as a bit of a waif trying to shore up her personality against a hostile world.
Here she’s a teenage girl who lives in a home, a shy kid who one day meets her exact opposite, a tough street rat who lives on her wits, largely by shoplifting, and who knows what else.
Nina (Hummer) is immediately taken by Toni, as is Christian Petzold’s camera, which hangs off the brutally beautiful features of Sabine Timoteo like a dog that hasn’t had its dinner. I’ve seen Timoteo in two other films and can confirm that it’s always a bit like this, her attractiveness seeming to spring from something inside her, not just her looks.
Anyhow, back to the plot, though that’s about it for this side of the story – Nina and Toni form an immediate bond, becoming fast friends shading into lovers. The other side of the film concerns a French couple. Francoise we meet being let out of some psychiatric clinic, and Pierre, the largely inconsequential husband, is picking her up in their upmarket BMW after the latest of her flame-outs.
When we learn that Francoise has been driven mad by the abduction of her daughter outside a supermarket years before, and that the girl has never been seen since, a dot… dot… dot… line of plotting suggests that it’s going to be either Nina or Toni who is the missing daughter.
I can’t remember which of the Berlin School of directors Petzold is (loosely) part of said there’s always something of Snow White in their films but there is a Babes in the Wood, Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood quality to Ghosts, though in fact Petzold and co-writer Farun Harocki based it on the little-known Grimm brothers story Totenhemdchen, aka The Shroud, about a mother who grieves so extremely over her dead child that it cannot ascend into heaven.
Building out from that idea, Petzold and Farocki take in the other things that anchor us too firmly to a way of life. Francoise, who cannot shake off the memory of the missing daughter, though Pierre ever so gently suggests that maybe she should. Nina, burdened by a crippling reticence that is ruining her life. And Toni, wedded to a lifestyle that’s going to be her undoing. We’re all trapped, is the suggestion, though some of us have an upmarket BMW to help us deal with it.
Like all Petzold movies this is worth seeing, but it is minor Petzold, looking like it was made for TV and pretty short (85 minutes). It’s marked out by typically fabulous performances by Hummer, who is unrecognisable if you saw her in Die innere Sicherheit. She gets a standout scene where she can demonstrate some aspects of her versatility but in the main she graciously cedes the floor to Timoteo, who can do no wrong as the spiky, sexy Toni. Marianne Basler as the grieving Francoise gets the upmarket clothes and the majority of the emoting and is so good as the maddened mother that when Petzold throws in a funny curve ball in the film’s final scenes, it almost doesn’t register. I’ll say no more than that it calls the entire character of Francoise and the relationship between her and Pierre into question.
There is tension in all the relationships – Nina and Toni shouldn’t get on, Francoise and Pierre don’t really connect at all – but also a dramatic tension arising from the question Petzold poses very early on about the identity of the missing daughter.
This means that Petzold and his regular DP Hans Fromm can just tell the story in a straightforward way, no tricksiness required. Instead, the mood is intimate, haunting, like the music on the soundtrack, Bach’s gorgeous cantata Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (BWV 21), which translates as “I Had Much Grief”. Yup.
Ghosts – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
