Der rätselhafte Klub

A crepuscular Berlin, 1923, flickers under soot-streaked streetlamps while a clandestine cabaret, the Sphinx-Club, doubles as a chessboard for masked millionaires and gutter-born illusionists. Esther Hagan’s Lyuba—part Siberian refugee, part chandelier chanteuse—descends nightly to sing lullabies to spies, her throat a trembling compass that points toward every hidden door. Harry Piel, co-writer and athletic anti-hero, barrels through the plot as Jens Richter, a stunt-pilot turned reluctant sleuth, chasing a ledger that can topple ministries; his leaps across tilting rooftops feel like Fritz Lang slapstick drenched in Weimar angst. Paula Barra’s cigarillo-wielding Countess von Kastell choreographs a ballet of blackmail, trading silk-gloved caresses for cabinet secrets while Hermann Stetza’s police inspector—equal parts Javert and carnival barker—pursues phantoms down sewer tunnels that smell of wet cinematograph nitrate. The MacGuffin is a wax-sealed envelope containing Prussian blueprints; every handshake in this film is a forgery, every kiss a wire-tap. When the curtain finally drops, the club itself—part fun-house, part tribunal—reveals trapdoors within trapdoors, and the surviving characters step into a snow-globe Berlin that may be only another soundstage. The narrative coils like cigarette smoke: ostensibly a detective chase, it is secretly a melancholic treatise on spectatorship, asking whether anyone ever leaves the theatre or merely trades seats.