Die Unsichtbare (2011)

Josephine Lorenz, known as Fine, is an unremarkable acting student from Berlin who lives with her single mother and her disabled sister, Jule Lorenz. Completely exhausted, she attends an audition for a new production of the play Camille. Despite all the shouting, she falls asleep onstage and makes a fool of herself. But the theater director, Kaspar Friedmann, invites her to another audition, where she impresses him with her Danish skills and naturalness. To everyone’s surprise, she is cast in the lead role of Camille. Friedmann quickly takes Lorenz under his wing and tells her about Marlon Brando and how, in his form of Method acting, he assigned an animal to every character he played. Friedmann sees Camille as a starving hyena. Fine takes his words to heart and plays a starving hyena at home. After receiving further tips on how to identify more strongly with Camille, Fine begins pretending to be Camille and follows her secret crush, her neighbor Joachim. She approaches him in a Chinese restaurant, and the two grow closer. Fine still stops short of kissing him, though. Even so, she continues seeing him. A short time later, Friedmann discovers that Fine has a disabled sister, Jule. He invites Fine to dinner to talk with her about the character of Camille. They also discuss painful experiences from their past. Fine tells him how, at the age of eight, she broke her arm and hid the injury; her parents did not notice that her arm was crooked because they were so focused on her sister Jule. When Kaspar presses her, Fine reveals that she wished Jule were dead. Later, Kaspar has the students and Fine act out a rape scene. The pain she experiences provokes her mother into hitting her. Since Kaspar’s advice on identifying with Camille is working, Fine sleeps with him and grows emotionally distant from Joachim, who works as a tunnel builder. Fueled by all the anger she has experienced, Fine loses control during rehearsals and lashes out wildly. Kaspar is absolutely delighted, but some of the other actors are appalled, wondering how far acting should go. Fine hears that Kaspar latches onto his actors’ psyches like a leech, then lets go and ignores them. Fine then asks Kaspar why he cast her in the lead role at all, and learns that it was simply because she is psychologically damaged. Fine is shocked and starts provoking Kaspar. Eventually, she also refuses to undress onstage. Things at home get worse, too, after she provokes her mother. She finds her room completely trashed, and her mother claims Jule did it. Fine hopes to find peace with Joachim. She sleeps with him and is happy. He even asks her to go abroad with him. But the next morning, when he follows her and finds her naked at rehearsals in the theater, hearing the dialogue she had whispered in his ear earlier, he is horrified and leaves. That evening, Fine also has to hear from her mother that she blames her for Jule being so unhappy. Fine loses control during the night and nearly smothers Jule with a pillow. She tries to apologize the next day, but Jule is distant and rejecting toward her. Fine sees only one way out: suicide. She takes pills and cuts her wrists. Her mother gets home just in time to save her. Fine makes peace with herself. She approaches Kaspar and says she is willing to surrender herself completely to her role. She also tries to reestablish contact with Joachim. But although he agrees to meet her, he has moved out by the time she enters his apartment at the agreed hour. Still, Fine finds enough strength to take the stage for the premiere of Camille.