So laut du kannst (2022)

Kim Krawitz and Maja Heller have been best friends since their school days. They both work as physiotherapists and are planning to open their own practice. Before doing so, they work one last time as hostesses at a Gentlemen’s Evening in a luxury hotel, where they serve drinks to high-ranking businesspeople. The event is dominated by men who do not always respect the bounds of good manners. Maja is asked outright how much money she would take to go to a guest’s room and “keep the party going a little longer.” Among the guests, Kim unexpectedly runs into her former school friend Maximilian Holtdorf, now a successful lawyer. They are both delighted to see each other again. At the end of the evening, Kim and Maja have one more drink at the hotel bar. While the bar is unattended, someone slips knockout drops into Kim’s cocktail. When Kim returns to the bar after taking a phone call, and Maja comes back from the restroom, Kim leaves the drinks with Maja because she spontaneously accepts Maximilian’s offer to drive her home. The next morning, Maja wakes up in a hotel room. Her back is covered in bruises, and she doubles over in pain. After vomiting, she quickly leaves the hotel and shows up for work as if nothing has happened. Eventually, she tells her friend Kim that she was raped. They go to the police together and report the incident, but the knockout drops can no longer be detected. Through her boyfriend Maximilian, who was a guest at the event, Kim finds out that the wealthy lawyer Lukas Berger raped her friend Maja that night. The police question the suspect: Lukas Berger even confirms that he and Maja had sex in the hotel room, but says it was consensual. The officers regret that there is nothing more they can do, and Kim and Maja realize that a judge is unlikely to believe them: they cannot prove that a rape took place. While Maja desperately tries to return to everyday life despite her panic attacks, Kim is determined to see justice done and bring the perpetrator to account. With help from the agency assistant who handles the hostesses’ bookings, she discovers that women had been assaulted at earlier events, too. But all the women she manages to contact either keep quiet or do not want Kim to speak to the police. When the organizer of the Gentlemen’s Evening also threatens that her investigations will not end well, she turns to Maximilian, with whom a relationship is beginning to develop. He tells her where she can find Lukas Berger, and Kim confronts him at a marina. She confronts him with the facts, and he reluctantly admits his guilt, which Kim secretly records on her phone. Maja, however, desperately wants the subject of the rape to be put behind them at last and tries to stop Kim from investigating further. The women’s friendship is put to the test. Nevertheless, they rent a practice space when a real-estate agent offers them suitable premises. Maximilian alone promises Kim his support and gets her to hand over the recording of Lukas Berger’s admission of guilt. When Kim tells Maja about this, Maja throws her out of the apartment. A former hostess visits Kim and explains that all the women affected signed confidentiality agreements in exchange for large sums of money, all drawn up by Maximilian’s law firm. Kim then goes to the firm, makes her way in to see Maximilian, and encounters Maja, who is being handed her confidentiality agreement. Outside the door, Kim accuses Maja of selling her dignity. Hurt, Maja replies that if Kim herself were ever raped, she could turn down the money. But what happened to Maja cannot be undone. Kim follows Maximilian and his colleagues from the firm to a dinner, where Maximilian is introduced as the firm’s new partner and Lukas Berger’s company is welcomed as a new client. Kim accuses Maximilian of betraying her trust. A year later, Kim and Maja meet again at Maja’s new practice. They reconcile. Maja points out to Kim that the next annual Gentlemen’s Evening will take place in two weeks. In a hotel room, Maja and Kim sit with a reporter and watch a monitor showing the same setup as at the event the year before. This time, however, one of the hostesses is wearing a hidden camera, which is transmitting live footage from the hall to the reporter’s monitor.