Nacht vor Augen (2008)

Twenty-five-year-old career soldier David Kleinschmidt returns to civilian life after a deployment in Afghanistan. He does not want a particular incident from his military service investigated and refuses to attend a reintegration seminar offered by the Bundeswehr or to see a psychologist. In his hometown in the northern Black Forest, his girlfriend Kirsten is waiting for him in their newly furnished shared apartment, looking forward to being together. But David has changed. He is withdrawn and hostile, cannot bear intimacy, and repeatedly reacts with startle responses and outbursts of anger. At night, he secretly washes his bedclothes and underwear, because he has started wetting the bed. David returns to his former job as an emergency medical technician. His friend Felix is now his boss. David soon learns from his Bundeswehr superior how the mysterious incident is to be handled: David is to receive a deployment medal for having shot an attacker in self-defense. However, he is to keep quiet about it. A leak turns David into a local newspaper hero. At a welcome-home party with friends and family, he shows photos from Afghanistan. The visitors are disturbed and overwhelmed by his pictures of mutilated people and corpses. David becomes increasingly isolated. He also brushes off a home visit from the Bundeswehr psychologist. David now spends most of his time with his shy eight-year-old half-brother, Benni. Since Benni is teased and bullied by his classmates, David wants to teach him strength and toughness. Their games and dares become increasingly violent, and David is especially aggressive toward himself as well. Before long, Benni too starts wetting the bed. David can no longer keep up the heroic legend about himself. He tells Kirsten, who is growing increasingly despairing over him, and his closest friends that in Afghanistan he shot a little boy for no reason, and that the memory is now haunting him. His friends are once again overwhelmed by the starkness of what he tells them. Felix soon begins looking after Kirsten, whom David frightens with his outbursts of anger. One of Benni’s playmates is seriously injured when Benni deliberately leads him the wrong way in the woods during a dare. David, who had already made Benni beat his beloved injured rabbit to death, takes a pistol and goes into the woods with him, where he challenges the boy to shoot him as a test of courage. Benni cannot cope with the situation and runs away. When David, who has by then also lost his job, draws attention to himself by shouting aggressively as a spectator at a football match, Kirsten calls the police for help, and they overpower him. Under this pressure, he finally agrees to go voluntarily to a clinic for therapy. After a long time, he returns to Kirsten, Benni, and his family as a changed person once again and still undergoing medication-based treatment; they, too, have matured.