Sterben für Beginner (2024)

Eric learns that his best friend Alex has a brain tumor. Alex’s girlfriend, Karla, is pregnant. After quitting his job as a music manager following an argument with Sophya, Eric stops by a funeral home where a vacancy is advertised in the window. He introduces himself to funeral director Volker Mutz, whose niece Anita also works at the company, and is hired on a trial basis. Eric sees his role as helping the bereaved, while Mutz always tries to sell them the most expensive coffin model. He is opposed to innovations such as creative funerals. The hospital’s findings show that Alex’s brain tumor is malignant and inoperable; he is to receive radiation and chemotherapy. Alex asks Eric to bury him personally. Karla has also canceled her midwife because she wants to move to New Zealand for a better work-life balance. Eric then puts her in touch with Manuela, a midwife from the maternity ward whom he knows from a one-night stand. Alex makes a video for his unborn child. Although he used to think marriage was bourgeois, he proposes to Karla, and they get married. At the wedding, Alex’s parents, Birgit and Paul Weber, argue with Karla over whether Alex should be buried in Berlin or with his parents in Landau. Eric and Mutz also have a row. Eric says the company needs to treat people more humanely. Mutz replies that, at the end of the month, Eric can find a funeral home where things are more humane. Alex eventually dies at home, with Karla, Eric, and his parents by his side. Eric drives Alex through Berlin in Mutz’s hearse, with the coffin open. The question of where Alex will be buried remains unresolved. Eric spends the night in the hearse beside Alex’s body; the next morning, a mounted policewoman wakes him and accompanies him to the funeral home. The urn bearing the inscription Alexander Weber-Lowien is buried in Berlin. Eric digs it up again that night and gives it to Alex’s parents. He gives Karla some of the ashes in a bottle. Eric promises to retrieve the urn after Alex’s parents have died and reunite the ashes. On Eric’s last day of his trial period, Mutz tells him that the clients liked him. Mutz has run the funeral home for 45 years and is on the verge of closing it. Although Eric has cost him a great deal of money and nerves, Mutz offers him the chance to take over, since Anita does not want to. Anita is to stay on and be impossible to dismiss; Mutz wants ten percent of the revenue, and his own funeral is to be conducted according to his wishes.