“I understood that this had little to do with Berlin and everything to do with me,” the unnamed narrator of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts proffers confessionally as she recounts an extended trip to the city, impulsively made and justified in retrospect by the self-righteous hand of autofiction. A solipsist by profession and serial narcissist off the job, her quasi-fictional persona enacts an all-too-reflexive posture of cynical ennui, mining the barren psychogeography of her lonely time in Berlin — as a floundering yet resolutely independent expatriate — for glimpses into her interiority. This approach commands grudging admiration for its commitment to subjectivity, but, being borne out of a literary disposition, risks epitomizing the banality that its logorrhea inevitably gives rise to.
Oyler’s caricature of the German capital nonetheless accurately captures a mood of unsettled transience, and this unmoored sensibility is rendered more acutely and successfully in Johanna Schorn Kalinsky’s debut film, Headlights. Though not a New Yorker’s whimsical account of folly and entitlement, Headlights follows a similar logic of alienation. In the film’s most pronounced conceit, the city of Berlin is visually sparse and relegated to the background, its existence affirmed by auditory cues and utterances. In its place is the interior of a car, and its protagonist Alexandra (Marie Bloching), a 20-something woman, occupies the center of this space. An advertising agent by day (or perhaps only in name), Alexandra sells drugs at night from her car, effectively putting an illegal spin onto an already unregulated economy of Uber drivers and gig work. Her mobility, livelihood, and psychology, we gather, are all in some way informed by the constraints of her vehicle.
Kalinsky deftly exploits the car’s unique status as a site of constant liminality to flesh out Alexandra’s person. Over a series of flashbacks, Headlights constructs a tenuous portrait of a woman beset by personal grief and unhappiness, without offering too much causal resolution. We learn something about the characters in her life, who are kept either out of focus or off-screen entirely: her mother, her deceased brother, her brother’s fiancé, and so on. These flashbacks, we also come to realize, are non-chronological: a radical re-ordering of them in lieu of a conventional reading (i.e., her drug-dealing as a consequence of her past unhappiness) would not be implausible. Much like David Easteal’s The Plains (2022), which is also set (almost) exclusively in a car, Kalinsky’s film peeks into a space of foreign familiarity in which casual reflection and conversation reveal whole unseen lives beyond the present journey.
But where Headlights swerves away, and stands out in its own right, is in the camera’s unyielding fixture on Alexandra. Bloching’s performance, inscrutable on the surface, plumbs great depths of sorrow, snark, and self-awareness — a cacophony of feeling that wells up and enlivens the film’s formalist strictures with pathos. Kalinsky bookends her narrative with scenes of New Year’s Day, when fireworks light up the sky outside and Alexandra drives wordlessly around the suburbs of her clientele. The effect is melancholic, not just because of the jarring clash of sound and silence, but also a result of the day’s significance as a summation: of regrets of auld lang syne, and of possibilities never to be realized. The substrate of Berlin may prove conducive to melancholy, but in the words of Robin Schulz’s 2015 single of the same name, “chasin’ all the headlights” to “get ahead of life” actively precipitates this sadness. For Headlights, the opposite might be true. Alexandra is behind the headlights and she’s already gone forward, but life always finds a way.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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