Finding Yourself Under the Bassline

Read Time:6 Minute, 15 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Breakfast at Berghain
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Genre: Comedy / Short / Adventure
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 14 minutes
Director: Autumn Palen
Writer: Autumn Palen
Cast: Dominique Booth, Johnny Briseño, Jul Kohler, Riley Nottingham, Wylie Strout, Jonathan Grey, Mark Simich, Cassius Franciosa, Diogo Hausen, Jordan Roman, Chanelle Wang, Jessi Spickard, Tatyana Figueiredo, Carson Bailey, Frankie Campisano, Steve Autore
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Dances with Films Los Angeles

RAVING REVIEW: Rosie hears about Berghain the way a lonely child might hear about Oz, heaven, or a place where the people at home can no longer reach you. BREAKFAST AT BERGHAIN builds itself around sincere longing, sending a sheltered small-town girl from a miserable family breakfast to one of the most mythologized nightclubs in the world. The joke is obvious enough, but writer/director Autumn Palen doesn’t treat it only as a punchline. The short is funnier when it leans into Berghain as an impossible idea rather than a real destination. Techno becomes religion, escape, community, and self-erasure all at once.

At 14 minutes, this is a compact burst of weirdness, and it knows exactly which ideas it’s playing with. BREAKFAST AT BERGHAIN isn’t trying to explain club culture to newcomers or build a grounded coming-of-age arc from small-town misery to Berlin liberation. It’s more like a cracked fairy tale told by someone who fell asleep during breakfast and woke up three years later under a strobe light. Rosie, played by Dominique Booth, doesn’t just want to visit Berghain. She wants to disappear into it, and that desire gives the film its heartbeat. Under the absurdity, there’s a recognizable ache behind the comedy. The fantasy of walking away from a life that never fit and finding a chosen world loud enough to drown out the old one.

Rosie lives west of nowhere with a family that seems to resent her existence, and the arrival of Walter, played by Johnny Briseño, introduces her to the legend of Berghain. From there, the film quickly escalates into a trip to Berlin, nightclub gatekeeping, and negotiations with a Doorman. Palen’s short isn’t especially interested in plausible connective tissue, which is mostly fine. Its logic belongs to daydreams and half-remembered stories from people who swear they had a life-changing night out but can no longer account for the details.

The short throws a lot of mythology into a small container. From Rosie’s family, Walter’s testimony, the journey, the Doorman, Vattenfall as a Swedish goddess of gas and electricity, and the idea of a years-long dance-floor awakening. Those pieces are amusing, and several are odd enough to stick with you. Packed together, they sometimes feel more like a list of eccentric ideas than a steadily rising endpoint.

The Berghain angle gives the short a cultural charge because the club already exists in the public imagination as a place where entry feels like judgment from a secret society. Palen uses that well, turning the door into a mythic threshold rather than just a bouncer blocking the way. Mark Simich’s Doorman becomes less of a person than an obstacle, the kind of gatekeeper who needs to be tricked, moved, or redirected before the hero can pass. The bit involving Rosie’s shoes is silly, and the film’s commitment to that silliness matters. BREAKFAST AT BERGHAIN works best when no one on screen seems to know they’re inside a joke.

Booth’s performance helps hold the whole thing together. Rosie needs to be naive without becoming a parody, and Booth gives her enough open-faced determination to keep the film from collapsing. She plays Rosie as someone who has confused escape with destiny, which is exactly the sort of confusion that makes sense in a story like this. Briseño’s Walter functions more as a catalyst than a character, though his presence gives the early stretch a welcome shock. Jul Kohler’s Vattenfall and Simich’s Doorman push the film further into fable territory, where the cast’s job is less about realism than selling the rules of a world being invented in real time.

The framing suits the material, giving Rosie’s pilgrimage a boxed-in, storybook quality that plays against the club's supposedly infinite promise. The format also helps the short feel a little more handmade, which fits its scrappy identity. BREAKFAST AT BERGHAIN has the charm of a film that doesn’t want to hide the strange impulses. That can be part of the appeal, especially in a midnight shorts block, where personality often matters more than control. Palen’s work here has a pleasing willingness to be ungainly, horny for absurdity, and emotionally sincere in the same breath. The idea of losing years to an unbroken dance party is funny and strangely sad, and the short understands that. The execution feels slightly more stated than felt. Rosie finds a home in the beat of house music. For a story about found family and surrendering yourself to a crowd, the crowd itself remains more symbolic than lived-in.

Even with that gap, BREAKFAST AT BERGHAIN has enough personality to make its 14 minutes worthy. It’s not a script that refines every idea into its strongest possible version, and not every joke lands with the same force. Its appeal comes from the willingness to follow a deeply silly premise toward something unexpectedly tender. Palen understands that a place like Berghain can be funny because of its exclusivity, intimidating because of its reputation, and moving because people project so much hunger onto it. Rosie’s pilgrimage may be absurd, but the need underneath it isn’t.

BREAKFAST AT BERGHAIN is chaotic in places, amusingly specific, and more heartfelt than its eccentric surface might suggest. It could use more room, more rhythm, and a stronger sense of what Rosie discovers once the door finally opens. Even so, it has enough oddball conviction to stand apart from more anonymous festival shorts. For a film about losing yourself in a concrete temple of bass, it’s at its best when it lets the weirdness sweat through the walls.

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