Oh, This Unspeakable Void

Twenty-year-old Joachim has been knocked off his feet by his brother's death in a car accident. He leaves the family home in northern Germany for Munich, where he passes the entrance exam for the Otto Falckenberg drama school — only to find he can make nothing of the teaching. What steadies him is not the school but his grandparents' villa, where he moves in. There, strict daily rituals, peculiar family habits and a fairly generous intake of alcohol govern ordinary life, and it is in that house that he slowly begins to function again.

The film is based on Joachim Meyerhoff's novel, published in 2015. Meyerhoff is an actor at the Burgtheater and the Schaubühne who has been at least as successful as a writer: this is the third volume of his autobiographical cycle, and it draws on his own years at drama school in Munich, including the period spent in his grandparents' house.

The title is a quotation from Goethe. It comes from Werther, and in the film the grandfather speaks the line in full: "Ach, diese Lücke, diese entsetzliche Lücke, die ich hier in meinem Busen fühle!" In the novel this gap belongs to everyone Meyerhoff lost early — first his brother, then his father, finally the grandparents he loved. The Hungarian title renders the second half of the line.

There is one further layer worth knowing about. Simon Verhoeven cast his own mother, Senta Berger, as the grandmother, and made the film after the death of his father, the director Michael Verhoeven, in April 2024. Verhoeven has called it his most emotional film, and has said that on set they met as director and actress rather than as mother and son. So a film about absence was itself made around a freshly opened one.

Bruno Alexander takes the lead, Michael Wittenborn plays the grandfather, and it is the chemistry between the three of them that German critics have singled out most often. Laura Tonke and Devid Striesow appear as the parents, with Karoline Herfurth, Anne Ratte-Polle and Tom Schilling in further roles. German reviewers describe the film as family comedy, theatre drama and coming-of-age story at once; Filmdienst rated it "worth seeing." It opened in German cinemas in January 2026.