Dolores (2016)

Stuttgart in the 1950s. Model maker Georg Letterer lives with his lazy brother Franz, who has diabetes. They have little money, and their belongings are about to be seized and they are facing eviction. One day, the famous film actress Dolores Moor gets a flat tire in pouring rain outside Georg’s house. Georg invites her in and takes care of the car. The actress is impressed by his perfectly detailed creations, and commissions him to build a model of her villa. She plans to move to Hollywood, but is deeply attached to the Bauhaus-style building because it was designed by her late father, an architect. She offers Georg the chance to move into the villa while she is away and work on the model there. He can bring his brother, too, but Georg keeps this from Franz because it is a welcome opportunity to get away from him: Franz takes advantage of his illness and lives at Georg’s expense. Georg moves into the villa and begins measuring it meticulously. The materials must be the same as those in the real building, too, so that the model will be an exact replica. The house’s residents are also to have miniature counterparts in scale. As Georg works, he is watched suspiciously by Anton, the chauffeur, who fears from past experience that Georg intends to exploit Dolores and enrich himself. Simone, Dolores’s manager, is fascinated by Georg, falls in love with him, and begins an affair with him. But Georg becomes increasingly fascinated only by his work and by his employer. By chance, Georg discovers that he can manipulate physical reality in the villa through his model. Objects he moves in the model move in the real world, too. He causes the chauffeur to have an accident, and makes Dolores’s American co-star and lover land hard on the floor after the man makes disparaging remarks about the model at Dolores’s birthday party. Suddenly, Georg’s brother shows up at the party and learns that Dolores had offered to let him move into the villa as well. Furious, he leaves the party and collapses on his way home. But Georg ignores the doctor’s instruction that his brother needs intensive care, and after some time Franz dies. As time goes by, Georg grows more and more obsessed and increasingly exploits his magical ability. Using a lighter and the corresponding doll, he causes his American rival to suffer the most severe burns while he is in the bathroom, leaving him unable to make films ever again. When Simone realizes Georg wants to turn her into a second Dolores through her clothes, jewelry, and hairstyle, she tries to throw him out. But Georg makes a wall topple in the model, causing its real-life counterpart to fall on Simone and kill her. When an investigator eventually gets onto Georg’s trail, Georg makes him drown in the pool in front of the house by pushing his figure underwater in the model. Eventually, only Dolores and Georg are left. To possess her, he largely cuts her off from the outside world, posing as her agent and manager. He reviews her film offers, which are becoming fewer and fewer because, by industry standards, she is already getting on in years; the quality of the scripts is also increasingly poor. When the script for the Sissi film adaptation arrives, he initially conceals from her that she is being considered for the role of the Queen Mother, not, as she assumes, the title role. Eventually, Dolores discovers the truth about Georg and his model. He has also made miniature duplicates of the film posters displayed around the house, replacing the real co-star’s name with his own. Dolores tries to escape, but using his model, Georg blocks all the exits with concrete walls. He promises to let Dolores go if she helps him with the final step in completing the miniature villa: putting on the roof. Once this is done, the exits open again, and Dolores immediately tries to flee. But to her horror, she discovers that completing the model has made the garden and everything around the real villa disappear, leaving nothing but an abyss of white nothingness.