WAS UNS NICHT UMBRINGT

It's a funny idea: Sandra Nettelbeck plucks the psychologist Max, played wonderfully helpless by August Zirner, from her 2001 success MOSTLY MARTHA and, some 17 years later, constructs a melancholy and heartwarming film around him. Or rather: around an ensemble, since Max not only listens to his ex-wife who is also his best friend, but also to his daughters, a woman with a gambling addiction, a zookeeper with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a pilot with panic attacks, a fearful mortician – and then there is this dog ... With the help of some smart directorial flourishes, with precise dialogue and eve more precisely placed moments of silent Nettelbeck crafts a deeply lovable panorama of the small and big insanities in life.