Die Tochter (2017)

Luca’s parents, Jimmy and Hannah, get divorced when Luca is five years old and have lived apart ever since. Two years later, when the three of them travel to a Greek volcanic island to renovate their old holiday home and prepare it for sale, the estranged couple unexpectedly grow close again as they find a shared rhythm while working, with Luca alone on the beach. “He polishes a door, she scrapes off paint; they fall into a shared beat, get in sync with each other—a wonderful scene in which love begins to glow again.” Luca, who has spent a lot of time with her father in recent years and is very close to him, while viewing her mother as an annoying rival for her father’s affection, is not pleased by her parents’ newfound happiness in love. The jealous daughter Luca now tries to sabotage her parents’ rekindled relationship and turn them against each other. Luca watches with anxious concern as Jimmy’s heart is not in good shape. “In almost surreal images, we see the heart pulsating.” When Jimmy once becomes short of breath, Luca conjures a protective circle around him. Another time, in anger, Luca wipes away the magical protection she has placed around Jimmy. Luca rejects her mother and believes that she is not her biological mother, and that perhaps they were switched shortly after birth. The funny thing about that, she says, would be that Jimmy really is her father. Luca threatens to run away and never come back. She imagines that she is dead and that everyone will regret what they did to her for the rest of their lives.