Berlinale 75: Islands, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, and Köln 75

by Elisa Giudici

 

Three more reviews for you from the 75th edition of the Berlin Film Festival, all of them successful films, too. 

KÖLN 75 by Ido Fluk (Belgium/Poland/Germany)

The word that best describes this film is energetic. While it firmly belongs to a well-trodden genre, Köln 75 immediately stands out for the sheer force and irresistible vitality of its young protagonist. That energy pulses through this fast-paced, sharp-witted musical biopic, which engages directly with its audience, frequently breaking the fourth wall to recount a remarkable yet nearly unthinkable chapter of 1970s music history.

The film centers on the legendary Köln Concert, Keith Jarrett’s solo performance that would later become an iconic album. What makes the story feel so fresh, though, is its unexpected perspective...

Instead of focusing on the musician at the center, Ido Fluk's screenplay shifts the viewpoint to the concert’s promoter—the 18-year-old Vera Brandes (German actress Mala Emde) who is obsessed with jazz, and locked in conflict with her father who is pressuring her to choose a more stable, conventional life.

Vera is pure, unfiltered energy—a whirlwind of rebellion, determination, and a complete inability to take no for an answer. While structurally conventional, the chosen perspective is not. Köln 75 fully embraces its protagonist’s irreverent spirit, injecting Fleabag-esque moments, playful visual flourishes, and bold editing choices to keep us hooked. And it works!  Even when the film delves into exposition—explaining, for example, jazz’s evolution from jam sessions to Jarrett’s improvisational experiment—it does so with flair. Michael Watts (Michael Chernus) delivers these insights through direct audience interaction, aided by slick graphics and dynamic cuts. Familiar but undervalued American actor John Magaro (recently outstanding in Past Lives and September 5) embodies Keith Jarrett’s melancholic genius with precision.

The end result of all their efforts is film as vibrant and unconventional as the young woman who made that historic concert happen.

ISLANDS by Jan Ole Gerster (Germany)

Sam Riley stars in "Islands" © Protagonist

Islands excels at two things above all else: building a long string of expectations in its audience—and profoundly boring them. But wait! That tedium is entirely international. Everything in Islands, a new film from Jan Ole Gerster (best known for A Coffee in Berlin, 2012) is slow. The protagonist Tom (Sam Riley)  is a man in limbo, his memory riddled with blackouts from nights of heavy drinking and reckless escapades—not as a tourist, but as a tennis instructor at a resort in the Canary Islands. Islands masterfully captures how he has become numb to the beauty around him, drifting aimlessly as the monotony of his days anesthetizes him against the ghosts of his past and any ambitions he may have had for the future.

A female tourist (Stacy Martin), one among the weekly waves of arrivals spilling from shuttle buses, disrupts this man's stasis. She’s looking for tennis lessons for her son and is stuck in a marriage brimming with tension. Tom allows himself to be drawn into their lives—enthralled by her, oddly attached to her son, and even friendly towards her husband, who, after a wild night, suddenly vanishes.

The situation remains ambiguous, as does the woman’s behavior. She stirs something in Tom that he had carefully buried—memories of a stalled career, the lingering echoes of a local legend that serves as a cruel reminder of what he lost. The brilliance of Gerster’s film lies in how he manipulates our expectations, letting us chase after a puzzle that may not even exist. Islands tells the story of a fleeting infatuation, one that always teeters at the edge of reciprocation. As is sadly so often the case, the predictability of a well-worn unhappiness is more comforting than the terrifying possibility of happiness; Happiness requires risk, vulnerability, and change.

Anchored by a pitch-perfect Sam Riley (Control), who embodies Tom as a man rediscovering what it means to feel—only to remember that feeling can also bring pain—the film culminates in a final revelation. Tom, and we along with him, come to understand how easily we let ourselves be seduced by the possibility of the future, all while ignoring the unmistakable signs of the present.

REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Belgium/Luxembourg/Italy/France) 

You can practically hear a hyper-excited Quentin Tarantino buzzing right beside you as this delirious eurospy homage unfolds before your eyes. At its worst, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is an exhausting tour-de-force through that sub-genre of low-budget Italian and European titles that took the visual and narrative template of 007 to its most extreme, turning it into a parody and a kitsch mutation. At its best? Well, it's the the exact same thing—only in an exhilarating way. This is a film that pushes boundaries, driven by an unmistakable passion for cinema, fully committed to its aesthetic choices and the art of crafting striking imagery within the constraints of B-movie filmmaking. It revels in the hallmarks of the genre: femme fatales, enigmatic men of few words, flickering projectors casting exotic visions onto female bodies, and hypnotic wallpaper patterns that feel like they'll swallow you whole.

The line between dream and reality is completely obliterated—as is the notion that you can follow a film like this through the lens of logic. The only way forward is to surrender to lead actor Fabio Testi, drifting through the halls of a lavish, baroque hotel on the Côte d’Azur, haunted by a past that may be fictional, cinematic, or something even stranger. This hotel is inhabited by assassins, mercenaries, and sadistic tycoons.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond is the kind of audacious, genre-bending gamble rarely seen outside the festival circuit. At one point, I thought, 'all that’s missing are the rubber masks'—only to realize I had underestimated Cattet and Forzani’s deep understanding of the genre. They don’t just pay homage; they sculpt a fever-dream hallucination entirely through razor-sharp imagery, playing with its tropes and pushing them to surreal extremes.

Now, I know that the audience for a project like this is undoubtedly niche, but those on its wavelength will love it. There’s something exhilarating about seeing filmmakers dare to reimagine genres that were once confined by time and budget—and transform them into experimental, visually explosive works of art rather than disposable pop entertainment.

Comments

[NATHANIEL R]

ooh love an unexpected angle so I want to see KOLN 75.