Cicadas

Cicadas unfolds with a painterly precision, as Ina Weiss crafts a meditation on the shifting landscapes of age, responsibility and the quiet ruptures of everyday life. Nina Hoss delivers a controlled performance as Isabell, a 48-year-old architectural engineer whose life begins to unravel after returning to the quiet Brandenburg village of her childhood, where she meets single mother Anja (Saskia Rosendahl) and her young daughter Greta.

More than anything, Cicadas is shaped by departures. Greta dashes after a bus she cannot catch. Isabell’s husband, Philippe (Vincent Macaigne) walks away from her at the airport without a backward glance. Conversations are cut short, hints of romance are fleeting, suspense vanishes without warning, and characters leave the frame before resolution can take hold. The expectation, always, is an exit. Yet, in its final moments, Weiss subverts this pattern: instead of retreating, Isabell joins her mother, Anja, and Greta at the table. It is an almost imperceptible shift, but with the film’s signature restraint, the moment speaks to the rebirth its title suggests.

Greta’s childhood, though precarious, overflows with the unselfconscious joy of adolescence. She and the fostered boys she befriends revel in small transgressions – vandalising car windows, throwing sticks at passing boats, asking strangers for spare change to buy a shared chocolate popsicle. Their world is fluid and expansive, brimming with possibility, until a moment near the end when they push too far. In contrast, Isabell’s ageing father, once a celebrated architect, is now confined to his apartment, reliant on carers, his former authority reduced to fragments of memory. The interplay between these extremes – freedom and constraint, agency and dependence – forms the film’s central tension.

Visually, the movie mirrors its thematic concerns, drawing on cinematography that resists certainty or resolution. The camera frequently positions characters in doorways and through windows, just beyond reach, creating compositions that evoke a sense of distance physically and emotionally. The spaces they occupy – from the country house that once belonged to Isabell’s parents to the apartment they now inhabit to Anja’s sparse rental room – are minimal and cold, reflecting the isolation and uncertainty that permeate their lives. The interplay of shadow and overexposed sun heightens this sense of impermanence, casting fleeting glimpses of warmth in an otherwise detached world. 

Cicadas refrains from offering resolution or imposing meaning. Buildups fade into nothing, and the tension never lasts. Like the cicada’s brief song, there is a quiet reflection in everything – a gentle reminder of life’s transient nature.

Christina Yang

Cicadas does not have a release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Berlin Film Festival coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Berlin Film Festival website here.