Im Spinnwebhaus (2015)

Twelve-year-old Jonas helps his loving, sensitive, but completely overwhelmed mother, Sabine, with family life, housework, and raising his younger siblings: nine-year-old Nick, who is hyperactive, and four-year-old Miechen. Jonas had to take on responsibility at an early age after his father, Sven, left the family. Their mother, Sabine, has a secret she calls her demon. When she suffers from these episodes, she is sometimes no longer herself. Jonas even takes the wheel of the family car after Sabine nearly causes an accident. When she is suffering from her demon, she disappears into her room, locks herself in, and becomes unreachable to the children. After their mother has a nervous breakdown, Jonas looks after his siblings for a weekend so she can recover at a place called Sonnental. The siblings enjoy a carefree time without their parents. But Sabine does not return after the weekend, leaving only a message on the answering machine saying that her fight against the demon is not yet over. Jonas tries to keep things in order and continue acting like an adult, but, over time, they run out of money and food. Miechen’s kindergarten teacher becomes suspicious, and when Jonas is once late picking Miechen up from kindergarten, she takes her home with her. The house falls into increasing disrepair, but the children find it more and more cozy as they redecorate it a little, collect small animals and insects, and cobwebs form throughout the house. Thus, the Spiderweb House comes into being. Eventually, the electricity—and therefore the lights in the house—are cut off, and Jonas has to make do with grave lanterns from the nearby cemetery. While looking for food, Jonas meets Felix Graf von Gütersloh, a young drifter. Felix says himself that he is not quite right in the head, because he is constantly spooked and speaks in rhymes. Felix helps Jonas and shows him how to get food from the closed supermarket. Felix becomes Jonas’s guardian angel, showing him how to get by in a world without adult help and still remain a child. The pressure on the children increases as Miechen’s clothes and wildly growing hair attract adults’ attention, and she lets something slip at kindergarten. Jonas grows more and more afraid each day that they will all be sent to a children’s home. When their now-suspicious father suddenly turns up to see their mother, Jonas fobs him off at the front door with an excuse and goes out for ice cream with him. At home, he cuts his siblings’ hair using cooking pots placed on their heads as templates. By this point, Felix has got the children bicycles. Soon afterward, Miechen crashes her bike in the forest and gets a wound on her face. Jonas carries her home and manages to fend off offers of help from passersby. When the wound becomes infected and Miechen’s condition worsens, Jonas asks Felix for medicine, because the siblings are afraid to go to a hospital or see a doctor. Felix breaks into his parents’ castle to get medicine. The inflammation in Miechen’s wound gradually subsides with the help of iodine tincture. The children hide from the adults who ring the doorbell. To uncover his mother’s secret, Jonas enters her room alone and, after a brief search, finds her diaries. When he reads there that her three children are demons to her, and that Sonnental is a psychiatric institution, he is deeply distraught, cries, and becomes angry. Late at night, he goes to Sonnental to scream out his anger and guilt at his mother. When doctors come to the clinic entrance, he flees into the nearby forest. The camera shows dead crows falling down on him there as if in a nightmare, while he is entangled by roots. He then runs home. In revenge, Jonas burns Sabine’s diaries in the house together with Nick and Miechen. They hope this will finally put an end to the fight against the demons, and dance around the fire they have made in the living room. Smoke spreads throughout the house, and the siblings nearly pass out, but Felix manages to save them. When Jonas wakes up, Felix looks at him and asks whether he is an adult now or not. Jonas has realized that he is not yet ready to be an adult, and is glad that he is still allowed to be a child. Their mother, Sabine, has also returned. Nick and Miechen are happy about this, but the pent-up anger rises in Jonas again. He blames Sabine for the children’s facilities in the house being completely destroyed. His mother promises to rebuild everything. Jonas storms out of the house in anger and, riding his bicycle in the forest, meets his classmates, whom he had been unable to see all this time because of the difficulties in his family.