Asphaltgorillas (2018)

Atris works as a drug dealer for the Berlin crime boss El Keitar. One night, he happens to run into his childhood friend Frank, whose glamorous appearance makes a strong impression on Atris. What Atris doesn’t know, however, is that it is merely a façade concealing Frank’s life as a con man. Frank offers Atris a way to finally escape his petty-criminal surroundings: he wants Atris to help with a large-scale counterfeit-money deal he plans to pull off with the Triads. At the same time, Atris meets Marie, a shoplifter who moves confidently and fearlessly through Atris’s macho “Gorilla” world and refuses to submit to its patriarchal power structure. Atris decides to stand by her and break away from El Keitar. He agrees to act as a courier in Frank’s counterfeit-money deal so that he can use his promised share to travel to Tokyo with Marie. But when Frank fails to get the capital needed for the deal from his girlfriend, Oxana, he hatches a plan with Ronny, a shady criminal, to get hold of the Triads’ counterfeit money without paying for it. Frank’s idea is to switch the bag of counterfeit money during a staged diversion and set up his former friend Atris at Oxana’s apartment, the agreed meeting place for the handover. At first, it seems to work. But Ronny doesn’t wait for Frank and instead takes the counterfeit bills back to Oxana’s apartment, causing the situation to slip out of Frank’s control. Meanwhile, Atris has to come to terms with being betrayed by his friend, and finds himself drawn ever deeper into a chaotic spiral of danger and absurdity. In the end, only Marie can help him: she takes half the counterfeit money for herself without asking and shows him that he shouldn’t think he’s the hero of the story. At the end of the film, the two are seen together in Tokyo, where they exchange the counterfeit bills for real ones.