Auf dem Grund (2019)

Anne is a successful swimming coach. She supports young up-and-coming swimmers and prepares them for the state championships. One of them is her own niece, Julie. This often causes disagreements with her sister Miriam, who is convinced that her daughter is being put under too much pressure to perform by her aunt. Anne herself had also seemed destined for an outstanding swimming career, but for reasons that initially remain unclear, she lost her nerve at a crucial competition. The relationship between the two sisters and their mother, Inge, is also very difficult. When their mother celebrates a milestone birthday, a row breaks out: when a glass jar containing stones painted by children is brought out, their mother leaves her own birthday party and remains unresponsive for several days. Anne’s father, Helmut, stoically puts up with this behavior. Anne, however, disturbed by what has happened, tries to find out what went on. While her mother is away, she searches her room and finds an old court document. From it, Anne learns that custody of a boy named Michael was transferred from her mother to her first husband—that is, she must have a half-brother she knows nothing about. Around the same time as the birthday party falls apart, Anne begins having delusions of shadows and aquatic plants in deep water, which she had already suffered from several years earlier. However, she refuses psychotherapy. Anne contacts Michael’s father and gets Michael’s address from him. She and her sister Miriam decide to look for Michael, only to discover that the address is for a cemetery. There they find their half-brother’s grave. He died at the age of nine, just one year older than Anne. Anne confronts her father, Helmut, with what she has learned. For the first time, he tells her that Inge had another child, a son named Michael, who came to visit during a holiday and drowned in a swimming accident. Helmut shows her some amateur film footage of the incident. Anne had completely repressed both the incident and the existence of her half-brother, who lived with his father. Inge and Helmut had decided not to tell their children, Anne and Miriam, about their brother, for fear that the incident might upset them, and made it a family secret. Anne goes to the lake, where her memories gradually begin to come back. As she dives underwater, she remembers what happened: when she was eight, she went into the lake with her brother Michael. He became tangled in aquatic plants, and Anne was unable to free him, so Michael drowned in front of her. Once Anne has uncovered the secret, the delusions disappear. Her niece Julie also takes part in the state swimming championships. During the competition, however, she loses consciousness due to overtraining and has to be rescued from the water by Anne. Like her aunt, she thereby misses an opportunity for a swimming career. Anne admits that the reason she failed at her swimming championship many years earlier was that, during the competition, she hallucinated a boy at the bottom of the pool and dived down to save him.