Eins ist nicht von dir (2015)

After years full of adventure, airline captain Uli Becker retires, having earned it. He finds it difficult to leave his familiar ways behind, because he was neither a faithful husband nor a caring father. He was always on the go, but was always happy to come home again. Shortly before his wife Heide suddenly dies of a heart attack, her last words to her husband are: “One of them isn’t yours.” Uli starts to brood and then looks at his three children with suspicion. He can hardly accept that Heide might have been unfaithful to him. Although he was never particularly strict about that virtue himself, he always believed that, in his heart, he had never betrayed his wife. During this time of self-doubt, Heide regularly appears to him in imaginary form, and he has conversations with her as they did in the old days. To find out which of his children has the least in common with him, he sets out to visit them one by one. First he goes to his son Thomas, who is getting married soon. While his fiancée waits for him at home, Thomas is enjoying himself at a company party. That settles it for Uli: the boy takes after him. The second candidate is his daughter Bettina, whose paternity he is actually sure of, since she is the oldest of the three. Her marriage, in which she functions only as a housewife and mother, is in crisis, and Uli’s visit does little to ease the situation. Married life is much more turbulent for his son Christian in Kassel. Here, Christian is the househusband and looks after the children, while his wife, a successful doctor, is hardly ever at home. Christian has a poor relationship with his father, who never had time for his children. He brings this up at every opportunity, and Christian therefore justifies his decision to give up a personal career in order to be there for his children. Christian thus stands out the most, convincing Uli that he must be the only one who could be the cuckoo’s egg. Although all three children more or less turned him away, Uli did achieve his aim: he secretly collected DNA samples from all of them. But his appearance had an unexpected effect on his children, who begin, in some ways, to question their lives. For Bettina, it ends with her deciding she no longer wants to be her husband’s slave, so she leaves him. Uli’s children also notice that their mother’s death is affecting their father more than they would have expected. During his visits, Uli also tried to make amends with his children, but at first he only caused damage, and in the end even put Thomas and Jessica’s upcoming wedding in jeopardy. Encouraged by his imaginary wife, Uli plucks up the courage to give his children a little speech. He wants to help them avoid the mistakes he made. They all respond well to this self-criticism, and the wedding becomes a truly lovely family celebration. Uli’s mood darkens, however, when the letter containing the DNA test results arrives. He hesitates to open it and, when he finally does, can hardly believe the result: according to the paternity test, he is 99.9 percent likely to be the biological father of all three children. Uli cannot make sense of it, and the imaginary Heide explains: “Of course all three of them are yours.” She wanted him to finally learn to appreciate his children, and in her opinion the best way to do that was to make him fear that he might lose one of them. She also explains that being named on a birth certificate does not automatically give you the right to be a father; you have to earn it. Every day, again and again. With these words, Heide disappears.