One of the great joys of cinema is experiencing other worlds, characters and perspectives, and exploring the ways in which they relate to our own lives. Often, it's through an actor's performance that we find those unexpected points of connection, sometimes leaving an indelible mark on us.
It's this very idea that inspired our latest special edition of READ ME. Not one, not two, but four personal reflections on the shapeshifter that is Sandra Hüller, from writers Hope Rangaswami, Catherine Wheatley, Savina Petkova and Jessica Kiang.
There's more to look forward to, with Hüller starring as German actress, writer and political activist Erika Mann, who drives her father, the exiled novelist Thomas Mann, through a divided Germany in Paweł Pawlikowski's FATHERLAND, now showing in cinemas.
2027 also brings the release of Markus Schleinzer's ROSE, in which Hüller plays a 17th-century female soldier who has been posing as a man all her life, a performance that earned her the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at this year's Berlinale.
Perhaps these reflections will bring to mind a Sandra Hüller moment that has stayed with you, while stirring anticipation for those still to come.
Foreword by Laura Stratford
REQUIEM for a dreamer
Hope Rangaswami
Requiem (2006)
I never thought of Sandra Hüller as a scream queen. Then I saw Requiem (2006), her first feature film role, in which a 27-year-old Hüller delivers some glass-shattering, room-shaking shrieks. Something in those screams, bursting with the rage and pain of youth, struck a chord. I associated Hüller with formidable women: always compelling but never exactly relatable. Seeing this other version of her – soft and hard, fearful and fierce – brought me closer to her.
Requiem tells the story of Michaela Klingler, a pious, epileptic 21-year-old who leaves her protective parents for university. Her epilepsy and its ceaseless stream of treatments delayed her education; now, she has a chance to make up for lost time. Her new independence hangs on her like an ill-fitting dress, tentative and stiff, but things soon settle. She gets herself a best friend (supportive), a boyfriend (formative) and a bob (transformative). A normal life is, finally, in sight – but when she ditches her medication and becomes convinced she’s possessed, that promise disappears from view. Disillusioned by doctors and seduced by her own delusions, she dismisses medical treatment and seeks help from holy men. Their exorcisms eventually kill her – she dies from exhaustion.
The film does not sensationalise these tragic events or lean on possession-horror tropes. There are no spinning heads, inhuman growls or torrents of projectile vomit. Instead, director Hans-Christian Schmid and Hüller take Michaela’s experiences seriously. We don’t hear the voices or see the apparitions in Michaela’s mind, but we feel what she feels. Hüller’s finely-tuned physicality is its own proof, her flittering eyes that spy devilish forms and jittery fingers that can’t grasp a crucifix telling us that for her, her demons are all too real. After a night spent fighting voices that tell her she’s a dirty slut, her friend Hanna (Anna Blomeier) finds her on the floor under her dorm room desk. Michaela jolts awake like a cornered spider, all twisted, terrified limbs.
There’s an embodied empathy to Hüller’s approach that makes Michaela’s story – based on the real life of Anneliese Michel – all the more haunting. When she isn’t believed, her quiet defiance speaks to the frustration of a woman labelled ‘crazy’. When her parents and priests corner her, her feral, gravelly screams speak to the countless women whose mental distress is viewed as a threat. Like Anna Karina in Jacques Rivette’s The Nun (1966) or Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1926), Hüller’s performance is equal parts strength and despair.
It isn’t just Hüller’s thoughtful take on possession that makes her role in Requiem so striking. Before the demons take hold, it’s just as mesmerising to watch her play a coltish twentysomething. When Michaela finds out she’s gotten into university, she vibrates with the need for freedom. Watch her in any scene in her parents’ home, and she is never, for a single moment, still. As her parents reluctantly let her go, it’s like seeing an animal raised in captivity freed for the first time.
Hüller nails the growing pains of starting university, that combination of youthful confidence and total cluelessness. At a party, her locks freshly chopped into a bob, she steps into the middle of the dancefloor. Her movements, which can only be described as hair-forward, aren’t graceful or pretty. Yet she glows with the knowledge that maybe she can be reborn, that her dreams might be within reach. What she wants most of all is just to be good, to be normal.
But being normal is hard, especially when your identity is in freefall. There are so many parts of herself that Michaela can’t express. She feels compelled to keep her epilepsy secret, ashamed of her condition. Her faith is a no-go, too. When her professor asks her, “What do you believe in?”, she answers, “In God”, making a lecture hall full of students laugh. It’s no surprise that when voices arrive in her head, they tell her that she does everything wrong. In her mind, parties and piety can’t mix. That dissonance tears her mind in two.
Hüller taps into the doubts, pleasures and frustrations of young womanhood with a sensitivity and precision that make Michaela’s story transcend its context. Even if I hadn’t seen Hüller’s other work before Requiem, her performance would still have shaken something loose in me. By the time I reached Requiem’s heart-rending end, I wanted to scream along with her.
Father Complex of TONI ERDMANN
Catherine Wheatley
Toni Erdmann (2016)
In October 2016, my dad had not yet been diagnosed with early onset dementia. I didn’t know that the somewhat eccentric behaviour he’d been displaying over the previous few months was caused by clumps of abnormal protein forming inside the brain of his frontal lobe; only that it was irritating, and occasionally (I’m ashamed to write it now) embarrassing. Watching the BFI London Film Festival screening of Toni Erdmann, I naturally sympathised with Sandra Hüller’s Ines Conradi, a thirty-something management consultant who is mortified when her father Winfried turns up at her place of work, seemingly with the sole intention of showing her up.
Ines’s ambivalence towards her father is palpable. In private, in the well-appointed apartment her assistant has sourced for her, she oscillates between condescension and contempt, tutting and huffing and rebuffing Winfried’s efforts at conversation like a sullen teenager. It’s clear that he infuriates her as only a taken-for-granted parent possibly can. At the same time, he is not without a certain power over her. That power lies partly in the risk an errant father might pose to a woman’s professional reputation: at a networking event, surrounded by clients she is desperately trying to impress, Ines freezes, rodent-like, peering out beneath hooded lids at her circling predator, eyes darting back and forth as if scanning for an exit. But there’s something deeper, more primal perhaps, at work: a kind of filial muscle memory that occasionally prompts Ines to play along, most astonishingly in a bravura sequence that sees Ines belting out Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All, accompanied by Winfried on piano. It should be a moment of glorious catharsis, but Hüller delivers it like a PowerPoint presentation: licking her lips and dipping her head, then briskly getting down to business.
The film’s emotional highpoint in fact comes a little later, after a brilliant, breathless set piece in which Ines finds herself inadvertently hosting a “naked party”, which Winfried attends dressed in a traditional Bulgarian fur costume that covers him from head to toe. Amidst the commotion, he creeps out of the apartment – and Ines, barefoot and wrapped in a thin gauze robe, follows. She finds him in a verdant park, where a little girl jigs and skips at his feet. Peeping shyly from behind some shrubbery, Ines observes the pair for a moment before suddenly, with a cry of “Papa!”, she, too, is skittering across the grass and flinging herself into her father’s arms, pressing her face into his furry neck and weaving her pale fingers into the dark strands of hair. For a moment they hang there, suspended in the morning sunlight, father and daughter. Nothing else exists. Then the spell breaks. They peel apart. With one final backwards glance, Ines walks back in the direction of her apartment.
The film’s final scene finds Winfried and Ines back in their old awkward dynamic, musing on what makes life worth living. “The problem is”, he tells her, “life is so often about getting things done. You have to do this or that, but in the meantime, it is just passing you by. How are we supposed to hold onto the moments?” Ines is silent. We can’t, of course, return to those moments – we mostly don’t even know we’re experiencing them until they are long past. Such is the nature of life, if not the movies. Some time after my dad died, I found myself passing an old poster for Toni Erdmann on a tube platform, featuring the image of Ines curled into her father’s embrace. Without realising what I was doing, I found myself running my fingers across its surface, and smiling.
Romance IN THE AISLES
Savina Petkova
In The Aisles (2018)
With a loud exhale, I asked my crush to take me to Costco on my first visit to a big North American city and to my surprise, he found the plea funny and exciting. In late-stage capitalism, it’s embarrassing to admit a warehouse-scale supermarket visit is your ideal date, but someone’s got to do it. Supermarkets are hyper-consumerist hellscapes powered by invisible labour. But they are also places of wonder, museums of the quotidian, and a prime yearning location.
However, what my date didn’t know is that my quirky date idea recalls a film I love and that I felt emboldened to kiss him in the aisles thanks to Sandra Hüller’s delightfully forward character in it. As supermarket stockworker Marion (Hüller) approaches the newly hired Christian (Franz Rogowski, ever so gentle), she catches a glint of fascination in his eyes. Senior than him and slightly older, she addresses the tiny power imbalance by raising a brow as she asks, “Are you afraid of me, newbie?”
The aisles can be a site for romance, Hüller’s taught me. But by the time I first saw Thomas Stuber’s In the Aisles (2018) in 2024, I had been marvelling at Hüller’s stoicism in The Zone of Interest and the levity she brings to epic-scale performances like in Toni Erdmann or Anatomy of a Fall, but I hadn’t seen her so inviting, so playful in the smallest gesture of desire. Properly flirting too – a hunger fuelling her gaze that leaves no room for doubt in our meek Christian, whose enthralled perspective guides us through the whole film.
He peers through the gap between the aisles, stealing a glance at Marion whenever he can and when they meet in the common room in front of the coffee machine, he lends us his gaze. Behold: there are close-ups of Marion’s eyes as she looks up at him shyly, a lingering shot of her smile widening, a snap of the pendant necklace hanging over her fluffy jumper – all fragments of a lover’s discourse. “Miss Sweet Goods,” he calls her, giving us a shorthand for Hüller’s candied, mischievous performance. She is in charge of confectionery after all.
When cinematographer Peter Matjasko frames Christian and Marion in wide shots between the lanes or at the forklift, it’s like no one else matters. Just two people in the supermarket at night, turning chaos into order by restocking and aligning crates to perfection. Love exists despite the maladies of our times and a blooming romance—unexpected, unsought, indecipherable, like the two protagonists themselves—is often what makes it all the more bearable.
Sometimes it starts with a disarming closeness or a gaze held for just a second longer, but in the shop aisles it’s even clearer that we yearn for tenderness. For someone so perfectly calibrated to every role, however different, Hüller also leaves room for that soft kind of ambiguity – her (already married) character may be forward, but she doesn’t go forward with it. Keeping the twinkle of hope alive is essential, it seems, for Marion as much as it is for Christian and his fantasy of her. It’s one of the very few exceptions where being in limbo is delightful, an expansive way to be with someone new, in the safe embrace of stocked-up shelves and darting carts. In the aisles, everything is possible – even love.
Dissecting Inaction in ANATOMY OF A FALL
Jessica Kiang
Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
The moment I fell fully in love with Sandra Hüller as an actress, having long admired her before that, comes late in Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall. Bestselling author, mother, widow and accused murderess Sandra — the character played by Hüller, as though the filmmakers want to cue another metafictional layer in a story all about metafictions — eats a sandwich. She's sitting on the bed in a sterile hotel room, her T-shirt rumpled over her shoulders. Strewn across her lap is assorted plastic supermarket packaging, maybe some sliced bread, maybe some lettuce and cold cuts. She eats mechanically, as though for caloric intake rather than pleasure or flavour. The TV is on. Chattering pundits pass glib judgements on her trial. It doesn't really matter whether or not she actually killed her husband, suggests one with an infuriating French-intellectual smirk, because the idea of a writer killing her husband is just so much more interesting than that of a teacher killing himself. A tiny frown creases Sandra's forehead and she switches the television off, then turns to gaze emptily out of the window.
It is a nothing moment, and it's still a little puzzling to me why it's the first thing that occurred to me to write about for this piece. Not her fantastic, reluctant Whitney Houston rendition in Toni Erdmann, nor her politely incredulous demurral when her cousin Heinrich von Kleist asks her to partake in a murder-suicide pact in Amour Fou, nor the cute flirtation-at-first-glance with Franz Rogowski in In the Aisles, nor the Harry Styles karaoke sequence in Project Hail Mary. Not even her chilling evocation of banal evil as she tries on the fur coats of murdered Jews in The Zone of Interest. And even within Anatomy itself, there are so many dramatic showdowns, quicksilver twists and fascinating code-switches that illuminate various facets of Sandra's endlessly complex personality, and that each come freighted with did-she-or-didn't–she mystery, that to choose this in-betweener scene seems pretty perverse. Yet this moment brought the slippery, elusive Sandra home for me. Who, among those of us who travel a lot for work, has not on occasion ended up joylessly snacking on convenience-store foodstuffs while cycling fruitlessly through the local channels on the wall-mounted hotel TV?
I've come to believe this scene stocks with me largely because of its quiet, solitary nature. Elsewhere, Anatomy's Sandra is almost always performing: for her husband, during the film's thrilling centerpiece argument; for the judge at her trial; for her lawyer/lover; for an interviewer or an interrogator; for her son. Similarly, up until that early screening before Cannes, the films I'd seen of Hüller's had usually cast her in a supporting role or as a co-lead, where she bounces brilliantly off her co-stars but is rarely wholly disentangled from the network of conflicts and relationships that power the story. (That is starting to change, most splendidly with her irreplaceable central turn in Marcus Schleinzer's Rose where she is often alone, cleaning a rifle or striking a flint behind the closed doors of a forest cabin.)
But Triet gave Hüller this one unshakeable beat back in 2023, and Hüller makes peculiarly riveting and oddly sympathetic work of what is really just a tiny sliver of inaction when, absent an audience, all Sandra's social postures are dismantled and she's just a woman, held in suspension in a nothing-place, eating a sandwich because she has to eat something, looking out of a window because she has to look somewhere, not happy but not distraught, and betraying no inkling of guilt or innocence, even though she's the only one who can know. Hüller has the rare and astonishing ability to access the fraught, ambivalent truth of who her characters are even when no one is watching, and it makes me want to watch her forever.
READ ME is dedicated to championing female voices in film writing, and we'd love to hear yours, too. Every SANDRA HÜLLER tee comes with a postcard, inviting you to write your own take on her performance in either FATHERLAND or ROSE (or both)!
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FATHERLAND now showing in UK & Ireland cinemas →