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.

The visual language reinforces that childlike disorientation without turning it into a gimmick. In one striking sequence, Cornelia lies collapsed on the floor and sends Ela away to eat, with the image suddenly turning upside down as Ela moves through the room. It is one of the rare moments in which the film briefly shifts away from Ela’s usual vantage point, making the physical world feel as unstable as the one she is trying to understand. Lehmann trusts the perspective of a child who sees and absorbs far more than she can articulate.

The performances make that perspective particularly affecting. Rosalie Thomass gives Cornelia warmth and vitality alongside the gradual exhaustion of a woman constantly being told to make herself smaller. Golo Euler plays Werner with an unsettling mixture of self-pity, insecurity and resentment, while Juliane Köhler brings a sharpness to Martha, Cornelia’s mother in law, whose complicity reinforces the pressure on Cornelia. Elise Lindner (Ela), meanwhile, carries the film’s emotional centre with remarkable restraint, capturing a child caught between what her parents tell her and what she instinctively understands.

Based on Daniela Dröscher’s bestselling novel, “Lügen über meine Mutter” is ultimately less interested in explaining its characters than in showing how a child learns to make sense of them. What begins as Ela’s attempt to understand why her father sees her mother the way he does becomes a quieter story about perception, memory and the things children understand long before they have the words for them. “Lügen über meine Mutter” hits German cinemas on October 8.

Santé, and welcome to a world that doesn’t feel too far removed from today’s reality. A world in which all illness has been eradicated, sanitized, organized and most importantly: safe. Or at least that’s what it promises to be. Where your health is your most important concern. An order, imposed by the state you live in. And welcome to the life of Mia Holl (Hannah Herzsprung), a neuroscientist in the system, thankful for the order in her life and her artificial home assistant who asks about her day and plays her favorite music. A bodiless voice, comparable to certain virtual assistants already present in some people’s homes. It already sets the tone of the film. Current, threatening and omnipresent.

A society where everything is based on the “Method”: laws, security, privacy. Even the central dating agency run by the government, based on genetic matches, might seem tempting in a world of failing dating apps. You might even catch yourself weighing the opportunity, only to be scared by your own thought a second later. Surveillance of your every move, and even if it sounds dystopian to us now, the film makes it look almost temptingly harmonious. At least for the first 15 minutes.

Then we get introduced to Mia’s brother, Moritz Holl (Damian Hardung), a free spirit, living by his own rules, rejecting the grip of the “Method” on their lives. You remember, yes, that’s an actual human, we were brainwashed for a second, with all the smooth-running interaction, trains on time and all illnesses eradicated, it seemed too perfect to be true. Because it wasn’t. But then Moritz gets arrested for the crime of rape and murder, which he insists are not true. And yet his DNA matches 100% with the DNA found on the victim.

Mia, and with her the viewers, are caught in the middle: on the one hand, she believes in the “Method”, after all, science has declared it infallible; on the other hand, she wants to believe her brother’s words. So she starts questioning the “Method”, something that shakes the foundation of this very society. As she is labelled an “Antimethodist”, not only does her social environment turn against her, her colleagues, her neighbors, society as a whole, but she also gets arrested as a terrorist, a revolutionary without ever wanting to be one, because those who think differently have no place in society.

The film, made by Lena Stahl and based on the play written in 2007 and later developed into a novel by Juli Zeh, is one of Germany’s best-known contemporary dystopian novels. In 2007 she wrote about a dystopian future not too far away, only 50 years away, and looking at it today, in 2026, she might not have been too far from it coming true. The film makes its currency even clearer.

The sets look real, probably because most of it was shot in existing locations that just happen to have a futuristic look to them, the soundtrack by Volker Bertelmann and Lennart Saathoff is minimal but emphasizes the atmosphere throughout the film, from the structured order in the beginning to the gentle moments between siblings to the confusion and anger of the protagonist.

Hannah Herzsprung delivers a convincing, more action-driven character than in the novel, fitting the atmosphere of the film and making the viewer feel with her on her quest to find answers. Damian Hardung makes Moritz feel like a brother we can relate to, while still leaving us to question his trustworthiness in some moments. His character gets a lot more time with our protagonist than in the novel, which enriches the relationship and emotional turmoil of Mia. Haley Louise Jones as a torn colleague turned friend of Mia makes you think of yourself in her position, making the viewer plead with Mia for her help and trust. Christian Friedel as the government-appointed lawyer for Moritz and later on also Mia adds another layer of people working for the government who are fed up with the “Method” but still work within its system, and Alexander Fehling as a journalist, who preaches that he wants to explore the truth and give Mia a voice, yet the audience can never be too certain of his real agenda, intentions and trustworthiness.

The dystopian genre in films was at its height during the early 2010s, yet over the last few years, there have been almost no new ones coming out, possibly to do with the almost dystopian society we experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic in the early 2020s. Now, AI is developing rapidly and is being used so extensively by everyone around us that it appears impossible to escape its spell, “Corpus Delicti” shows a reality that seems closer to what today’s reality looks like than any Hunger Games film we’ve seen so far. “Corpus Delicti” scares us with how real and possible its plot appears, while also leaving the viewer with little closure and plenty of food for thought. “Corpus Delicti” is out in cinemas all over Germany starting October 1st.

“Would I Lie to You?” is the first question “Gentle Monster” asks. Sitting at her piano, Lucy (Léa Seydoux) sings the Charles & Eddie classic in a stripped-back version that feels less like a love song than a question. It is a fitting introduction to Marie Kreutzer’s unsettling drama, where trust and doubt gradually become impossible to separate.

Lucy, a French concert pianist, has moved with her husband Philip (Laurence Rupp), a filmmaker, and their young son Johnny (Malo Blanchet) from Munich to the German countryside. Their quiet new life is interrupted when police officer Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase) arrives and confiscates Philip’s digital devices. He is accused of the possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material. As Lucy tries to understand what has happened, Philip offers explanations that gradually prove to be lies, forcing her to question the person she thought she knew, and leaving her with the lingering uncertainty of whether Johnny was affected.

Philip is used to looking at the world through a camera, documenting his surroundings and his family. Now, his footage becomes impossible to look at in quite the same way. Why did he record these things? Was it innocent, or was there another intention behind it? Once suspicion enters the room, even familiar images can suddenly seem to mean something entirely different. The film finds its tension in the space between what Lucy believes, what she fears and what she can actually know.

Alongside Lucy’s story, Kreutzer follows Elsa, the investigator handling Philip’s case. At work, she deals with sexual violence and crimes against children; at home, she regularly visits her father Hermann (Sylvester Groth), who is living with dementia and behaves sexually abusively towards his caregiver. Both women find themselves confronted with abuse within relationships that are difficult to simply leave behind.

Starring Léa Seydoux, Jella Haase, Laurence Rupp, Catherine Deneuve and Malo Blanchet, “Gentle Monster” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. A French-German-Austrian production set against the bleak scenery of the German countryside, the film explores the fragile foundations of trust and how quickly the image we have built of another person can begin to fall apart. “Gentle Monster” is in German cinemas from 17 September.