A soldier questioning his military service, a history student who considers Avatar a Marxist masterpiece, a man fascinated by Nazi architecture. The passengers in Sebastian Brameshuber’s “London” are an eclectic bunch, and their conversations rarely go where one might expect. Bobby (Bobby Sommer) picks them up on his weekly drive from Vienna to Salzburg, offering strangers a seat in his car to share the cost of petrol. What begins as a practical arrangement becomes a space in which people who have never met find themselves talking about things they might not tell anyone else.

Bobby has his own reason for making the journey. In Salzburg, his old friend Arthur lies in a coma. The two were once very close, but something happened between them, and they eventually lost touch. With Arthur unable to respond, Bobby is left wondering whether he will ever get the chance to address what happened. As the passengers come and go, he gradually begins to share fragments of his own life. When another passenger asks why he never started a family, Bobby speaks of the freedom and independence he was unwilling to give up. His answer leaves room for questions he does not seem ready to resolve. The more he listens to others, the more he reveals about himself.

His memories of his father offer another glimpse into the distance that has shaped his life. A postman who spent much of the war at the front, his father rarely spoke about his experiences. Bobby recalls returning home after two years in London and finding his father sitting in the same train carriage, pretending not to recognise him. It is a small but telling memory of estrangement, of a relationship in which even the simplest acknowledgement was withheld. Against this background, Bobby’s regret over Arthur takes on a different weight. His journeys become attempts to approach a past he can no longer change.

Brameshuber lets these encounters move between humour, awkwardness and unexpected intimacy. Some passengers talk almost without interruption; others struggle to find common ground. Their stories touch on migration, family, love and the expectations people inherit or choose to reject. Questions about Bobby’s own relationships linger, too, including the possibility of a life he has never fully explained. The film leaves these ambiguities unresolved rather than offering easy answers.

As a road movie, “London” is less concerned with reaching a destination than with what happens along the way. The motorway connects people who might otherwise never have met, giving them a temporary closeness without promising anything beyond the journey itself. Bobby can listen to a stranger or offer help, but he cannot undo the years of silence between himself and Arthur. What emerges is not simply a portrait of loneliness, but of someone who needs these exchanges as much as the people he picks up. For a brief stretch of road, he is no longer just the person behind the wheel, carrying others towards their destinations. He is someone looking for a way to live with what he cannot put right. “London” opens in German cinemas on October 15.