Blessed Events

Isabelle Stever’s first feature since the excellent ‘Gisela’ again centres on an ‘ordinary’ young woman caught up in an extraordinary situation: finding herself pregnant after an anonymous one-night stand, thirtysomething Simone not only bumps into the man in question at the hospital, but learns that he’d been hoping to see her again and is quite happy to settle down with her. But is this all too good to be true? The film explores the psychological consequences of this course of events with admirable understatement, steering clear of moral commentary, and deploying colour, lighting, landscape and architecture rather than dialogue to evoke Simone’s mood swings. Annika Kuhl’s performance is very eloquent, too.