Spätwerk (2018)

Paul Bacher, once a very successful writer, is going through a creative crisis and has not published anything for years. He is having an affair with his editor, Hannah, and has an ironic view of the world. He drinks far too much and now spends almost all his time touring the provinces, giving readings to aging audiences. One day, he picks up Daniel, a hitchhiker heading toward Berlin, but while carelessly reversing on a country road, he hits him, apparently mortally injuring him, and leaves him lying behind a tree. When he returns a short time later, the victim is no longer where he left him. At first, the incident sends him into an even deeper spiral, and Hannah cannot cheer him up either. In Berlin, he also goes into Daniel’s apartment and briefly runs into Daniel’s girlfriend, Tatjana, as he leaves. He then returns to the accident site, finds Daniel’s dead body nearby, and puts it in his trunk. A little later, the police stop him and confiscate his driver’s license because he has been drinking. He calls a woman he met a few days earlier in the town where he gave a reading. Teresa, a teacher, gets him out of trouble and drives him to the hotel in his car. They have dinner together and talk about their lives; for Paul, the evening once again ends in a drunken stupor. When he wakes up the next morning, however, he turns down the invitation to have coffee that she has sketched on a piece of paper. Instead, he sets off for his house by the sea, but first buries the body in the woods along the way. By the sea, he gradually starts writing again, drawing inspiration from his own experiences. The incident with the hitchhiker thus becomes the subject of his new work. To repay Teresa for helping him, he invites her to a publishers’ reception in Berlin. There, Hannah snubs her, but Paul runs after her, and they spend their first night together. Paul is able to write as he used to again. Paul and Teresa spend a lot of time together, begin a relationship, and she becomes pregnant by him soon afterward. When Paul’s new book, *Light at the Beginning of the Tunnel*, comes out, it sells very well, and he is back in business. After a reading, Tatjana approaches him. She says she recognized Daniel’s missing-person case in the book; only the names and the location were different. She also says he had been in Daniel’s apartment. “You mustn’t confuse literature with life!” he replies, and signs her book. Then he drives away in his car and sets it on fire with the belongings Daniel left behind.