‘Trial of Hein’ Review: Striking German Debut Set on North Sea Island

It’s an experience common among expatriates and cultural transplants that navigating a return to your origins is rarely a seamless reintegration. You have intimate knowledge of the life you left behind, but to the friends and family who stayed, your self-exile can remain a foreign land. The title of the posthumously published Thomas Wolfe novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, puts it more succinctly. That disorienting journey — of becoming an outsider in the place where you grew up — is at the heart of Trial of Hein, the transfixing debut feature by German writer-director Kai Stänicke.

The original title, Der Heimatlose, has no direct equivalent in English but indicates someone uprooted from their home — not to be confused with “homeless.” Hein (played by Paul Boche with gaunt severity and raw but contained vulnerability) is a man displaced, albeit by choice. He left the North Sea island fishing community of his birth 14 years earlier for the mainland. A boatman delivering him back to the remote island’s windswept shores asks, “Why would you come to this godforsaken place?” Hein stoically replies, “This is my home.”

Press materials and early coverage from the movie’s world premiere in the Perspectives competition of the Berlin Film Festival in February were oddly coy about the drama’s themes of queerness and self-denial, as if that constituted a spoiler. But the motivation for Hein’s return is suggested relatively early on and his estrangement from his roots — as well as the secrecy surrounding a relationship from his youth — will strike chords for many LGBTQ audiences who fled constricting, conservative environments for safer, more open-minded new homes and chosen families.

That said, the role that queer identity plays in Stänicke’s story is drawn with sufficient delicacy that anyone who no longer belongs to their birthplace — or whose birthplace no longer belongs to them — for whatever reason, will relate. The film has its North American premiere at New Directors/New Films, the showcase for emerging filmmakers put together by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, and has been acquired for U.S. distribution by Strand Releasing.

No sooner does Hein come ashore than the villagers begin to express their doubts that he is who he claims to be. Murmurs circulate that “the returnee” is an impostor. The advancing dementia of his widowed mother Mechthild (Irene Kleinschmidt) leaves her with shrinking windows of lucidity, which explains her failure to recognize her son. His married younger sister Heide (Stephanie Amarell) seems to want to believe him, as if responding to some sense memory of her sibling, but she was too little when he left to have any certainty.

The friend who was closest to him in his younger years, Friedemann (Philip Froissant), keeps a surly distance from Hein; he’s among the first to declare the returnee a faker. In a rare moment alone, Hein asks him, “I waited for you, why didn’t you come?” But Friedemann insists he has no idea what he’s talking about.

Hein persists, helping to bring in the fishing nets or making what seems like headway with the village elders when he shows up to drink schnaps at the tavern. But Friedemann remains the toughest nut to crack. Only toward the end does Hein break through enough to discuss the feelings between them and the plans they once made together.

In addition to Heide, played with poignant kindness, anxiety and longing by Amarell, Hein has a possible ally in his childhood sweetheart Greta (Emilia Schüle). She says that although he looks different, the more time she spends with him the more inclined she is to believe he’s Hein. But their history is complicated by his promise — or her assumption — that he would return and marry her.

Given the inability of the villagers to verify Hein’s identity, local chairperson Gertrud (Julika Jenkins) decides there will be a three-day trial during which his recollections of life on the island will be compared with those of witnesses chosen by the self-appointed judge. She even taps her sons to serve as court bailiffs. Chilly and officious, Gertrud presides over the hearings with the suspicious, narrowed gaze of someone who is anything but objective.

(In a characterization both harsh and archly amusing, Jenkins kept reminding me of a pissed-off Elizabeth Warren trying not to blow a gasket in an infuriating Senate hearing — no disrespect intended!)

With commanding austerity and a mood often reminiscent of folk horror, the film deftly maintains ambiguity about Hein — is he a prodigal son or a fraudulent intruder? We feel his distress when he’s ordered to demonstrate the correct way to gut a mackerel with speed and efficiency, a rite of passage for all boys in the village; or when he’s tested to find the site of his father’s grave without looking at markers. The writer-director’s sympathies are clearly with Hein, but his lack of clarity makes the villagers’ wariness somewhat understandable.

Conducted in the open-air, with tables and chairs arranged like a bare-bones amphitheater, the trial evokes an atmosphere somewhere between Greek tragedy and The Crucible, the latter allusion furthered by Stefanie Bieker’s costumes — functional peasant-wear that would not have looked out of place on Salem Puritans — and by the archaic German spoken.

Stänicke’s skill at combining febrile realism with aspects of Brechtian theatricality is evident especially in production designer Seth Turner’s stripped-down sets. The villagers’ homes are just façades, backed by a skeletal framework to trace the rooms of each dwelling. While the director has said the choice was dictated by budget limitations, he also drew inspiration from Lars von Trier’s Dogville — which in turn took its cue from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.  

Talented cinematographer Florian Mag’s breathtaking drone shots make the insular island community look almost like a movie set left standing after the production cleared out. But somehow it also feels like a fully inhabited environment in which prescriptive roles are being performed and judgmental eyes are always watching.

Unfolding at a stately pace over two hours, Trial of Hein is a movie of brooding intensity that never loosens its melancholy hold. In the haunted face of Boche’s returnee, there’s a lifetime of uneasiness, of feeling like a stranger perhaps on the mainland as much as on the island. He’s forced by the increasingly contentious hearings to face uncomfortable truths about the divide separating the man he wants to be from the Hein demanded by the villagers.

In a less rigorous drama, a climactic kiss might be a turning point toward mutual openness and release. In the affecting conclusion of Stänicke’s mesmerizing, superbly acted debut, it becomes a wrenching confirmation of unbreachable distance, of lives conditioned by this stark, unyielding place and an individual faced with a sorrowful choice between self-abnegation and flight. It’s riveting stuff.