German director Christian Petzold, the Chabrol of modern European cinema, delivers an elegant and disquieting psychological mystery of the sort that doesn’t interest today’s British film-makers, though this one appears to have more than a taste of PD James or Ruth Rendell. There’s also a hint of Joseph Losey’s Accident. It is about family dysfunction and grief and unnervingly lays out the aftermath of a sudden violent trauma. The faint suggestion that the film itself has gone into a kind of shock could have layered the proceedings with something infinitesimally dreamlike and unreal, an atmosphere often to be found in Petzold’s films. What makes this film interesting is that it isn’t heading for a macabre twist or chilling denouement but something positive and even redemptive.
Petzold’s longtime female lead Paula Beer plays Laura, a brilliant pianist studying music in Berlin, clearly in a fragile and depressed state. We are ultimately to see her on stage performing the third movement of Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs, the dreamily rippling A Boat on the Ocean, which gives the film its title. Paula is stuck in an unhappy relationship with boorish would-be music mogul Jakob (Philip Froissant), who one tense afternoon loses control of his open-topped sports car in the Brandenburg countryside. The results are catastrophic for Jakob, but Laura, thrown clear from the passenger seat, miraculously survives with hardly more than a scratch.
