‘My Wife Cries’ Review: Angela Schanelec’s Marriage Story Is a Moving, Mysterious Humanist Marvel

Berlin: The German auteur painstakingly fashions a tapestry of lost time.

The slow and stately rhythms of Angela Schanelec’s cinema have not changed over 20 years and ten feature films, however, as our world has grown twitchier, they have acquired an extra defiance. Long takes and static formal frames compel us to stand down stimulation-seeking tendencies. This isn’t to say her films are boring, there are mysterious rewards for sitting with them, and the rare sensation (evocative of the dear departed Frederick Wiseman) that the human behaviors on show result from a filmmaker striving for the fewest possible manipulations.

Following her hypnotic and unrecognizable retelling of the story of Oedipus, “Music” — which won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay in 2023 — Schanelec returns to the Berlinale competition with another elliptical dream of a movie. 

“My Wife Cries” is a marriage story, and like the Noah Baumbach version, we meet the couple as they are coming unstitched from each other. Thomas (Vladimir Vulevic) gets a call to say wife Carla (Agathe Bonitzer, star of “Music”) is in the hospital. What he does not yet realize is that the events that preceded her accident stem from a rupture that might have been there all along. Over the course of the film, the container of “marriage” is refashioned so that we see two individuals who — for a time — took refuge in each other.

While the typical screen interpretation of such a separation involves histrionic and hurtful expressions of betrayals, this particular puzzle box turns on both protracted silences and monologues (and one goosebump-giving group dance recital to Leonard Cohen’s “Lover Lover Lover”).

In the monologues, quotidian details pave the way for revelations that are deeply moving because they don’t feel like “dialogue” in any constructed fictional sense. Speeches land as heartfelt confessions as hesitant characters gently lay the groundwork until the moment of avowal becomes unavoidable. At which point, there’s no way out but through. The transition between lengthy anecdote and life-changing disclosure is hard to pinpoint; one moment you’re rocked by a lullaby of words, the next you’re sitting bolt upright in your chair.

Forging a narrative from the chronology of scenes is something I did retroactively to write this review. The experience of watching the film is comparable to overhearing a compelling conversation in a public space where, despite having no context, you feel desperately invested, and surreptitiously grateful for every detail that illuminates the lives of others. 

Schanelec shoots exclusively in the natural habitats of Thomas (a construction worker) and Carla (a nursery school teacher), introducing a handful of their friends and colleagues along the way. Everyone is given their own carefully constructed monologue, and no character is weighted as more significant than any other. There is the spellbinding sense that we are each a world unto ourselves, traveling our overlapping orbits. 

The impermanence of romantic relationships, with or without children, is a theme. Each relationship depicted exists at the intersection of being and not being. Andrée (Birte Schnöink) is divorced from Esteban (Thorbjörn Björnsson) with whom things are frankly amicable, even though he still yearns for her. Meanwhile, Sophie (Laure-Lucile Simon) is newly pregnant and far more delighted by this expectant state than her ambivalent young athlete partner. It feels like we could drop in with these characters in a few years, and the arrangements will have all fluctuated.

Schanelec drums up this particular time period with such focus on the moving parts that we are left knowing that change is the only constant. There are comparisons to be made in the sheer fluidity of the storytelling with the deceptively breezy films of the great French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve.

Comparisons end when it comes to visual language. Where Hansen-Løve cleaves closely to her characters, Schanelec takes a step back, filming in long and middle distance shots. Over the course of extended scenes, the eye roams the frame, alighting on the pop of natural and manmade details alike. Just as no character is positioned as more important than the other, so it is with everything the camera sees: a canopy of leaves, a bus stop, a bicycle, a brass band. Nothing is too inconsequential to be afforded its own dignified place in the family of things.

In one of my favorite scenes, Carla walks with her pregnant colleague through a park. A solid stretch of chit-chat has gradually — yet suddenly — erupted in a crescendo of emotional significance, and at this point, they stop to watch the brass band in the distance. There is no cut to a close-up of the trumpet player, the band remains as they observe it: shiny and disciplined on a remote patch of grass, a reprieve from the shifting sands of their personal dramas in the form of a tiny harmonious corner of pleasure.

Grade: A-

“My Wife Cries” premiered at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.