Summary
A Weimar-era fever-dream, Zwischen zwei Welten folds Berlin’s sooty gaslight into a prism of fractured identities: a demobilized dragoon (Max Laurence) returns from the dead borderlands clutching a passport stamped with another man’s soul, only to find his betrothed (Lucie Mannheim) betrothed again—this time to his former trench-comrade (Bruno Kastner) who has grafted the dragoon’s pre-war memories onto his own scarred psyche. In the liminal tenement where chandeliers drip wax like slow tears, a child medium (Hanni Weisse) channels the voice of the fallen, forcing the city itself—its pneumatic trams, its Spree-river fog—to become a palimpsest of guilt. Gustav Roos’s morphine-addicted coroner dissects not bodies but time, peeling nightly at the edge of the film frame, while Olga Engl’s cigarillo-wreathed procuress trades passports for oblivion. The plot corkscrews through séance parlors, bankrupt pawnshops, and a carnival mirror-maze where every reflection reveals an alternate biography; the final reel burns, literally, as the nitrate catches fire, letting the characters step through the charred aperture into a snow-blinded street that might be 1913, 1921, or the afterlife’s antechamber. Love here is a forensic reconstruction, memory a forged signature, redemption a bureaucratic error that lands the right soul in the wrong corpse.
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