Im Sturm
2021 · 17m · Alemania
Directed by Max Hegewald
Genres: drama, LGBTQ+, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Hamburg in the 1920s: while a storm brings the city to its knees, a man wanders determinedly through the streets driven by his greatest longing, love. The search for his great love leads him to a hospital; blessed to have found his husband alive, all happiness is denied him when the latter believes he does not know him.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The setup looks like prestige-drama wallpaper—doomed love, historical backdrop, the whole tender-melancholy package—but I'd need to see if Hegewald actually subverts the reunion-gone-wrong trope or just executes it with taste, which isn't enough.
A formally considered meditation on recognition and erasure set against Weimar Hamburg's visual chaos; the storm as both literal and metaphorical pressure, the hospital as threshold—this is cinema aware of its romantic and historical lineage, executed with measured emotional restraint.
That final beat—the husband's refusal to recognize him—hinges entirely on performance and how Hegewald frames the moment of non-recognition; it's the kind of small, precise choice that transforms a period romance into something about the violence of forgetting.