Kirschblüten & Dämonen (2019)

Ten years after the death of his parents, Trudi and Rudi, Karl Angermeier’s life is in chaos: The once-successful banker is unemployed and depressed. Because of his alcoholism, his contact with his wife, Anita, and daughter, Mia, is now restricted and supervised by the authorities. After a failed attempt to be with his daughter on her birthday, he reaches for the bottle again. Suddenly, Yu appears at his door—the last time he saw her was after the memorial service for her father in Japan. Hoping to lift Karl out of his emotional slump, Yu goes with him to his abandoned childhood home in rural Schongau. There, Karl finds himself confronted by demons and ghosts made flesh, which have haunted him since his own difficult childhood. His parents appear to him repeatedly, confronting their frightened son with reproaches and worries. During a visit to Neuschwanstein Castle together, Karl meets his sister-in-law Emma, who works there and is herself troubled: Ever since her husband, Klaus, began building a career as a regional politician for a right-wing populist party, their liberal son Robert has barricaded himself in his room, hoping to persuade his father to leave the party. When Klaus encounters his brother at home, the argument turns physical, and Karl storms out of the house. Meanwhile, Karl and Yu, who lovingly looks after him, grow steadily closer. But when she dances for him and undresses down to her underwear, he rebuffs her advances, citing his feelings of inadequacy. Shortly afterward, following another hallucination, Karl suspects that his nephew is planning to kill himself. He reaches his brother’s house at the last minute, breaks down Robert’s bedroom door, and manages to stop him from carrying out his planned suicide. On the way home, Karl collapses drunk on the forest floor, where he suffers severe frostbite and is later found. At the hospital, doctors inform his siblings, Karolin and Klaus, that he can no longer breathe on his own and is being kept alive only with the help of machines. When the family gathers at Karl’s bedside to have the machines switched off, however, he suddenly shows signs of life again. A short time later, he is discharged into his family’s care, and Karl’s ordeal brings them back together for the first time in years, after a long estrangement. Only once he is home does Karl learn that his penis was amputated because of his frostbite. Disoriented, he flees to Japan, hoping to find Yu again; she had disappeared after his accident. At a guesthouse, he meets her grandmother, who takes him in and later reveals that Yu had followed her depressed mother in death years earlier.