Summary
Berlin, winter 1931: neon sludge oozes across wet asphalt while the city exhales its last pre-Nazi cigarette. Into this chiaroscuro staggers Michael Hartung, once a celebrated gambler whose nerves were violin strings, now a penniless insomniac pacing the perimeter of his own ghost. His estranged wife, Irene—radiant as a streetlamp’s sodium halo—has re-married granite-industrialist Bruckner, a man who buys silence by the yard. Their adolescent daughter Lore, porcelain yet already chipped, drifts between drawing rooms, collecting secrets like cigarette cards. Michael, clutching a final marker signed in vodka and desperation, gate-crashes Lore’s birthday masquerade: masks of commedia dell’arte, champagne laced with ether, a string quartet sawing at Mahler. Over one suffocating night he wagers every last second of visitation rights on a single hand of baccarat; the cards sneer back. By dawn the girl has vanished, Bruckner lies pulseless beside a guttering candelabrum, and Irene’s silk gown is patterned with someone else’s arterial spray. Police sirens wail like Munch’s painted scream while Michael flees through Tiergarten fog, chasing the echo of Lore’s lullaby into Spree barges and anarchist safehouses. Each encounter—an absinthe-sodden poet, a one-eyed communist agitator, a cabaret chanteuse who sings only in questions—peels back another lamella of guilt. The city itself becomes prosecutor: streetlights flicker Morse accusations, cobblestones shift beneath his feet like a rigged roulette wheel. When the net finally tightens in the skeletal shell of the abandoned Anhalter Bahnhof, Michael confronts not detectives but Lore, revolver trembling in her small steady hand. She knows the truth: he did not kill Bruckner, yet his reckless return detonated the chain reaction that did. In the cavernous echo she offers him one final stake—walk away forever, or stay and swallow the verdict of her bullet. Michael steps forward, arms wide, and the screen detonates into whiteout. End credits roll over the sound of a single die clattering on marble, never landing.
