Excuse Me, I'm Looking for the Ping-Pong Room and My Girlfriend
2018 · 23m · Austria
Directed by Bernhard Wenger
Genres: drama, experimental, mystery
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
On a wellness trip at a bizarre alpine resort, one partner disappears and the other is no longer sure whether he is searching for her or for himself, as Aron begins a new chapter of his life.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A wellness resort that becomes a labyrinth of ontological confusion—the premise alone is a middle finger to earnest indie drama, and Wenger leans hard into the absurdity of a man searching for his girlfriend while actually searching for permission to become someone else. It's the kind of film that makes you uncomfortable because it refuses to decide what genre it is, and that refusal is exactly the point.
Wenger positions this within the lineage of Alpine cinema and the existential mystery tradition—think early Haneke's formal coldness applied to the supernatural resort as a space of transformation. The structure is precise in its ambiguity: every frame withholds clarity with the discipline of someone who understands the grammar of unease.
The genius here is the sound design's refusal to anchor us—every footstep on that resort's corridors carries equal weight, making the search itself feel phantom, which collapses the entire logic of 'finding' into something psychological. That one choice—treating the acoustic environment as unreliable narrator—does the heavy lifting of a much larger budget.