In the world of cinema, there are certain directors who wield the camera not as a recording device, but as a scalpel. With his 2025 film “You Believe in Angels, Mr. Drowak?” (Sie glauben an Engel, Herr Drowak?), Nicolas Steiner does precisely that. A director with documentary roots, Steiner now turns his lens toward a fictional tragedy and delivers a black-and-white symphony of brutalist architecture, alcoholism, and bureaucratic absurdity.
Loneliness as Visual Architecture
The film introduces us to Hugo Drowak—an aging alcoholic played by Karl Markovics—waiting for the end of the world in his dilapidated apartment filled with empty bottles. But this is no ordinary drama. Steiner’s ultra-wide-angle lenses and high-contrast black-and-white palette transform Drowak’s apartment and the surrounding concrete-block buildings from mere settings into living characters.
Cinematographic Language: Using focal lengths between 12mm and 16mm, Steiner traps the viewer in a kind of architectural alienation. While the characters are crushed beneath massive concrete masses, every frame is composed with the meticulous care of a photograph hanging in an art gallery.
Documentary Sensitivity: The observational patience Steiner brought to Above and Below is fully present here. Rather than rushing the plot, the film lingers on reflections in bottles, dust particles floating in the room, and Drowak’s rasping breath, offering a meditative 127-minute experience.
The Accidental Poetry Created by Bureaucracy
The engine of the film is an absurd state intervention: in order to continue living in his apartment, Drowak is forced by the government to attend a mandatory creative writing course. This is where the relentlessly optimistic student Lena (Luna Wedler) enters the picture.
“Can bureaucracy, by accidentally forcing broken people to produce beauty, sometimes create a miracle?”
The film revolves around this question, dancing delicately on the thin line between tragicomedy and surrealism. Lars Eidinger’s portrayal of the cold bureaucrat demands art as a measurable “output,” while Drowak’s resistance to this imposition ironically transforms into genuine poetry.
2026 Trend: The Aestheticization of Loneliness
As of 2026, a rising trend can be observed in European arthouse cinema: the treatment of social services and state intervention as elements of surreal comedy. You Believe in Angels, Mr. Drowak? stands as the most crystallized example of this trend.
Social Reflection: Instead of delivering a direct political critique of the loneliness epidemic in modern cities or the aging population, the film presents this condition as an aesthetic “beauty of ruin.”
Viewer Experience: The audience is enveloped not by pity for Drowak’s misery, but by visual pleasure. The cultural prestige carried by black-and-white imagery makes the slow pace and minimal plot not merely tolerable, but desirable.
A Retreat Worthy of a Gallery
“You Believe in Angels, Mr. Drowak?” earns its place through visual sensitivity rather than narrative momentum. By merging a documentarian’s rigor with the freedom of fiction, Nicolas Steiner has turned loneliness into a museum piece.
Why You Should Watch It: If you are passionate about brutalist aesthetics, if you want to lose yourself in the slightly distorted world created by ultra-wide lenses, and if you can imagine a Jean-Pierre Jeunet-style absurdity transplanted into a social services department, then this film is tailor-made for you.
