I was very pleased to be asked to review the latest short film by Jaschar Marktanner Vielleicht besser so (Perhaps Better That Way).

If you’ve seen Jaschar’s work or if you read my earlier thoughts on his clever sci-fi piece Turing Test, you’ll know this is a filmmaker who thrives on intimate ideas and big questions.

Vielleicht besser so isn’t about robots or futuristic labs, but about something entirely human.

The film opens with two friends, Clara (Lisa Leonard) and Jule (Marlene Fahnster, who played Sophie in Turing Test), meeting for coffee and quietly navigating their own internal walls. These aren’t sci-fi barriers or laser grids, they’re the psychological kind that keep us from saying what we feel or doing what we want.

It’s a neat shift of gears from Turing Test (which was Jaschar’s first film for six years), as this film feels richer, more nuanced, and perhaps gentler.

From what we gather, Jule is facing her own crossroads: she’s lost in thought, maybe wrestling with loss, maybe with choices unmade, maybe with the everyday pauses that feel like forks in life’s road.

We know her latest application (for a job, maybe?) has met with rejection.

Clara, meanwhile, has her own struggles, including keeping her houseplants alive.

There’s a joke here about Benjamin and sugar lumps – it meant nothing to me, until Jaschar explained it in an email. But to a German audience (unlike Turing Test, this film is in German) apparently it will be an instantly recognisable reference to an elephant character on children’s TV. It strikes me that’s a bonus for German viewers, rather than a loss for English speakers. Not knowing Benjamin won’t diminish your enjoyment.

The second half of the 12-minute film (though the preview version I saw may yet be slightly re-edited) shifts to night-time as Jule heads out to capture a memorable photo.

She encounters a young man (Francisco Aurell), who’s missed the last bus and is amusing himself with a stick – not “drawing pentagrams and summoning demons”, but he jokes “the night is still young”.

When he asks if she’s “heading somewhere or running away from something?”, we viewers are asking the same question. She says “Neither”, but is that true?

And we’re forced to wonder where this meeting will lead: Friendship? Romance? Danger? Or, like most encounters in life, none of those?

It’s a beautifully shot scene, which concludes a fascinating exploration of the mundane and the existential side-by-side. There are no gleaming labs this time, but rather cafés, bus stops, and the beautifully complex nature of friendship.

It’s an intriguing and charming little film, which will soon be hitting the festival circuit. You can find out more about Vielleicht besser so on IMDb.

If you’re involved in film production, or any area of arts and entertainment, please check out my business, Weltch Media to see how we could help.