A System That Forces the Knife Into Your Hand

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MOVIE REVIEWS
I Understand Your Displeasure (Ich verstehe Ihren Unmut)
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Genre: Drama
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 33m
Director(s): Kilian Armando Friedrich
Writer(s): Kilian Armando Friedrich, Tünde Sautier, Daniel Kunz
Cast: Sabine Thalau, Nada Kosturin, Werner Posselt, Sadibou Diabang, Nigyar Velagic
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: How Much Damage Can Be Done Without Raising Your Voice? I UNDERSTAND YOUR DISPLEASURE takes place in the soft-spoken question of everyday compromise; messages are always polite, meetings are serene, and harm is perpetrated with a smile. Kilian Armando Friedrich's first feature-length film is about indirect power, not through brutality, but through process, and it is chilling in its clarity.

Heike, played with remarkable reserve by Sabine Thalau, is a customer service manager at a cleaning company. She’s positioned between clients, upper management, subcontractors, and the workers whose labor sustains the entire infrastructure. Her task is arbitration. Her tools are de-escalation. Her worth is based on maintaining the enterprise's functioning. The film wastes no time conveying that this role isn’t neutral. It’s a pressure point.

The conflict we’re presented with unfolds with no fanfare: a subcontractor, upset by what he perceives as a violation of informal agreements, threatens to withhold his workforce unless Heike secures more hours and revenue for his team. To ensure this, Heike will have to fire one of her employees, an employee who is valuable, vulnerable, and related to her colleague Taja. What makes the situation hit so close to home isn’t its extreme nature, but its plausibility. None of Heike's choices seems exaggerated. None of them seems unreasonable.

Friedrich directs with precision and dramatic vision. There are no visual cues signaling to the viewer how to respond. Instead, the film trusts the cumulative effect of conversation repetition, the circular movement of meetings, and the complexity of inoffensive language and professional courtesy. At the moment the stakes become solidified, the film has already demonstrated how systems are constructed to make harm appear inevitable.

Thalau gives one of the year's most peaceful, yet brutal performances. Heike is neither depicted as a hero nor a villain. She’s competent, exhausted, and acutely aware of the repercussions of each decision she makes. Thalau portrays Heike as someone who understands the moral burden of her position, yet is systematically prevented from acknowledging it. Each attempt to find balance in fairness only creates another imbalance. Each act of responsibility only diminishes Heike's options.

The rest of the cast expands this tension without converting the film into a discussion. Nada Kosturin's Taja exemplifies a different connection to labor, one based on loyalty and concern for others rather than an impersonal distance from her colleagues. Werner Posselt and Sadibou Diabang personify the bureaucratic and contractual forces that don’t have to elevate their voices to speak for themselves, as the system already speaks for itself. No one is ridiculed. No one is excused.

It’s what makes I UNDERSTAND YOUR DISPLEASURE so disturbing, that it doesn’t provide an ethical exit strategy. There is no external entity to hold accountable. There is no perceived antagonist to vanquish. The film recognizes that contemporary forms of exploitation are often performed through politeness, procedure, and plausible deniability. The violence here is both economic and emotional; it’s just as real as it would be had it been violent and bloody.

Friedrich's background in documentary filmmaking is apparent in the film's observation of the mundane routines of daily life. The camera rarely interrupts the experience of lived life, and yet it never turns away. Friedrich uses editing techniques that focus on duration over urgency, allowing discomfort to build. Silence becomes accusatory. The lack of dramatization becomes its own condemnation.

One risk of this style is that some viewers may confuse restraint with neutrality. This film doesn’t lead the viewer to judgment; it expects judgment. And it is within this expectation that the film rises above the ordinary. I UNDERSTAND YOUR DISPLEASURE argues nothing. It simply demonstrates the truth slowly and unyieldingly.

By the time Heike makes her decision, the question is no longer what she should do — but whether the system has given her any reasonable alternatives at all. The film's concluding sequences are crushing precisely because they don’t resolve the dilemma. They demonstrate their endurance.

This isn’t a film about personal failure. This is a film about institutional coercion, how organizations present impossible choices and then condemn the individuals forced to make them. Friedrich's debut is exacting, courageous, and developed, indicating a filmmaker acutely sensitive to the moral implications of common labor. I UNDERSTAND YOUR DISPLEASURE doesn’t yell. It doesn’t comfort. It lingers on the damage and invites you to do the same. Few films this year are as silently merciless or as urgent.

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[photo courtesy of WENNDANN FILM, FILMS BOUTIQUE, THE PR FACTORY]

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