Happy Burnout (2017)

The old punk “Fussel” lives carefree from day to day and has no interest in working. Ms. Linde from the employment office helps him out because he tells her touching stories about a refugee child he is looking after. When an internal review means that all his benefits are about to be cut off, she arranges for a medical report certifying that he has burnout. As a result, however, he has to spend six weeks in a psychiatric clinic, where he pretends to have the condition. The other patients react to him in different ways. The ventriloquist Datty is delighted by him, while he has a major argument with the real-estate entrepreneur Anatol during a group discussion. Overall, he brings a breath of fresh air to the ward. The patients come alive during a football match he organizes. Psychologist Alexandra also notices his ability to relate to others. She has seen through the fact that he does not really have burnout, but offers to let him stay on as someone for the patients to talk to, because of staff shortages. He develops a particularly close relationship with Merle, a mother of four, whose husband tells her at the clinic’s open day that he wants a divorce. She angrily asks Fussel how men can abandon their children. She is also referring to him: since his wife died, his eight-year-old daughter has been living with her maternal grandmother, and he sees her only irregularly. He manages to persuade his depressed roommate Günther, whose face is red and sunburned, to have a beer with him at the village pub. Datty joins them, and at the pub he gets provoked into a fight, which Günther watches with amusement. In bed that evening, Günther says he used to run a chain of tanning salons, developed depression because of the heavy strain, and nearly killed himself in a tanning bed—and still intends to do so. But Fussel is asleep and does not hear him, so he is unable to prevent Günther from actually attempting suicide. Feeling no longer up to the task, Fussel returns to his apartment. The patients worry about him and drive to his home in the clinic’s electric vehicle. There they learn that he has gone to see his daughter. He does not get along well with his mother-in-law, who, for example, has already forbidden him to go camping with his daughter. He now tells her that he has changed and is more responsible and reliable. He pitches his tent in the garden and plays exuberantly with his daughter as the patients arrive. They assure the initially skeptical grandmother that they think very highly of Fussel and that they would gladly entrust their own children to him. In the end, Fussel returns to the clinic as a caregiver. Schloss Körtlinghausen in the Soest district of North Rhine-Westphalia served as the location for the clinic.