‘I’m Not Stiller’ review: Paula Beer and Albrecht Schuch star in 1950s Zurich-set thriller

Dir. Stefan Haupt. Germany/Switzerland. 2025. 99mins

Max Frisch’s 1954 novel in regards to the enigma of identification was printed in German as Stiller, however is understood in English translation as I’m Not Stiller – which conveys some sense of the contradictions this adaptation by Swiss author/director Stefan Haupt should grapple. This Fifties-set drama is a teasing, unapologetically cerebral arthouse thriller a couple of potential case of mistaken identification, extra an existential investigation than a thriller, per se.

This elusive drama by no means connects totally  

Screening in Munich’s CineCoPro Competitors, I’m Not Stiller is solidly executed however low on stylistic verve. It has its finest industrial asset in a robust efficiency from German star Paula Beer (seen not too long ago in Christian Petzold’s Cannes premiere Miroirs No. 3), right here starring reverse rising German title Albrecht Schuch (System Crasher, All Quiet On The Western Entrance). Nonetheless, Swiss writer Frisch – finest identified for his play The Fireplace Raisers and novels together with Homo Faber, which Volker Schlöndorff filmed as Voyager – is now not the modish literary title he as soon as was, which can not assist the worldwide possibilities of this considerably dour drama. The movie will launch in Germany (by means of Studiocanal) and Switzerland (Ascot Elite Leisure) in October.

Set primarily in Zurich, Haupt’s movie begins on a practice, with a shaven-headed, leather-jacketed man (Schuch) apprehended and brought in for questioning. He insists he’s a US customer named James Larkin White, however the authorities are satisfied he’s Anatol Stiller, a Swiss sculptor who disappeared years earlier when suspected of involvement in a homicide. 

The onus is on the imprisoned White to show he’s who he claims. Stiller’s spouse Julika (Beer), a former ballet dancer, instantly identifies him as her errant husband. However flashbacks to the couple’s earlier life, by which Stiller is a fiery artist on the rise, present an apparently totally different man. The truth is, the younger Stiller is performed with boyish nerviness by Sven Schelker, who seems sufficiently not like Schuch – but, in sure photographs, sufficiently related – to maintain us guessing in regards to the reliability of what’s seen and heard, partly by means of different characters’ perceptions.

Because the narrative flits by means of a sequence of non-chronological flashbacks – some sepia-tinged, some in black and white – Schuch and Schelker generally double up as Stiller in a single sequence. All this retains us weighing up the proof, together with Julika herself and a prosecutor (Max Simonischek) whose spouse (Marie Leuenberger, from Berlin standout Mom’s Child) occurs to have had an affair with Stiller years again – kicking off at, what else, a masked ball.

Haupt (who received Berlin’s Panorama viewers award for 2014 function The Circle) and co-writer Alexander Buresch contrive an elegantly difficult construction that isn’t wanting existential resonance in growing Frisch’s inquiry into being, look and fact. And the barbs at obsessive Swiss cleanness, in hygiene, structure and mores, are cannily threaded by means of the drama. 

But the result’s ponderous in its sober-minded restraint. And whereas that self-discipline works successfully for Beer (no stranger to the riddles of identification in Francois Ozon’s Frantz and her movies with Petzold), Schuch’s thriller man by no means fairly holds the centre, hampered as he’s by a job that, of its nature, calls for he by no means fairly comes into focus. Even so, Schuch is at his most participating when manifestly performing as a person who would possibly or won’t be taking part in his personal position – a paradox that goes some method to explaining why this elusive drama by no means connects totally.