Die Saat (2021)

The tiler Rainer Matschek, his pregnant wife Nadine, and their 12-year-old daughter Doreen have reluctantly moved into a small house in need of renovation on the outskirts of town after gentrification made their city apartment too expensive. Rainer has recently completed additional training to become a construction site manager, and his employer, Klose Bau, has provisionally entrusted him with building model apartments. His boss and friend, Klose Junior, has also promised that he can keep the position if a deal with investors is successfully concluded. Friendly and always willing to help, Rainer is keen to find good solutions and is popular with the crew. But his construction site comes under pressure to meet the deadline, and when it becomes clear that he can no longer finish on time, he is replaced by Kleemann, an experienced site manager. Rainer is demoted to construction worker and loses part of his salary. When Nadine is also unable to work because of her pregnancy and has to be admitted to hospital, the family comes under increasing financial pressure. Rainer therefore takes a second job on the night shift at a car wash and struggles with lack of sleep. His attempts to find a site-manager position elsewhere fail—as he later learns, partly because he now has a bad reputation in the industry. In a parallel storyline that initially seems unrelated, Doreen befriends Mara, the neighbor’s daughter, in their new surroundings. Although Mara comes from a well-off family, she tries to lead Doreen astray. After an attempted theft at a gas station, Doreen ends her friendship with Mara, who then follows and threatens her. Because of her parents’ strained situation, Doreen is often left alone and soon finds herself backed into a corner just like her father. Her parents cannot give her the support she now needs. The family barely communicates anymore. Site manager Kleemann runs Rainer’s construction site with uncompromising severity, so Rainer, who sees himself as representing the workers’ interests, repeatedly clashes with him—even when Kleemann threatens to fire him. Kleemann breaks up a spontaneous strike by threatening to replace all the workers with temporary agency staff. This ends the strike, but also seals Rainer’s dismissal. The conflicts erupt into fights, shown in alternating cuts: after being thrown off the construction site, a completely disillusioned Rainer first physically attacks Kleemann and then Klose; at the same time, Mara chases and attacks Doreen in a wooded area. Rainer eventually wrecks Kleemann’s car, but breaks down emotionally when it turns out that Kleemann’s six-year-old daughter was inside. Doreen pushes Mara down a slope, but then climbs down to her and helps her out. The two girls lie drenched on the ground.