Flunkyball (2023)

Unlike his older sister Milli, seventeen-year-old Franz is quiet and reserved. They both grow up sheltered in an upper-middle-class family. While accompanying his grandmother to the hospital, he meets Zoe, a beautiful, self-assured young woman. She approaches him and asks him to retrieve a bag she had left in the garden of her father’s house in a suburb. He hands it to her downtown that evening. They get talking and tell each other about their current circumstances. Zoe briefly becomes aggressive when he asks why she was in the hospital. She decides to help him deal with his grandmother’s doctors and suggests checking her apartment to see what medication she is taking, so they can confront the doctors with it. While Franz gathers the medicine in the bathroom, Zoe looks in every cupboard. Franz sees her playing with his grandmother’s pearl necklace and asks what she is doing. She replies that the jewelry being in its place is a sign that his grandmother is not demented. Since Zoe has now missed the suburban train, Franz puts her up in his family’s guest room. But that night she sneaks upstairs to his room because she does not want to be alone. Their parents listen to the sounds from their bedroom and happily get the wrong idea about what the two of them might be up to. The next morning, Zoe meets everyone in the family but turns down breakfast, saying she has to go to school. Yet as soon as Franz and his parents have also left the house, she returns and befriends Milli, who had previously been dismissive of her. When Franz comes home from school that afternoon, Zoe is still there; she and Milli have cooked a five-course meal for the whole family. It turns into a small celebration. Zoe gives everyone perceptive compliments and finds just the right words for each family member. Afterwards, Zoe, Milli, and Franz go to a club. Zoe gets drugs on Milli’s behalf, and they party all night. Later, Franz and Zoe roam the city alone. They are high, and Franz heckles passersby, thinking they are all “assholes.” When Zoe tells him about her brother’s gambling debts, he withdraws as much money as the ATM will allow and gives it to her. The next morning, he wakes up alone in a park sandbox. Zoe has disappeared, along with his phone and jacket. He goes to the address where he had picked up Zoe’s bag. It turns out that the Zoe who lives there is someone else, and that she was robbed by the woman Franz is looking for. Now his father insists on going to the police. At the station, her photo is identified in the police database, where she is registered for drug-related offenses. She had been admitted to the hospital because she was a danger to herself, and she actually comes from another city. But Franz is not angry with her; instead, he is worried and searches the whole city for her using the police photo. Eventually, he finds her in a subway station. She is staying in the passageway with homeless people. He offers her shelter with his family, but she sends him away: she does not need him; he is no use to her anymore.