No Good Men
The Berlinale has not opened with something this emotionally persuasive in years. With No Good Men, Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat delivers a film that appears modest in scale and technique yet proves unexpectedly buoyant. Its visual language is spare, at times almost elementary, but the lightness is deliberate. In a story about gender inequality in Kabul, hope becomes a quietly subversive choice...

Drawing once again on stories by her longtime collaborator Anwar Hashimi, Sadat builds the film around a deceptively simple question: do good men exist in Afghanistan, or has the culture made that possibility nearly unthinkable? Because filming in Afghanistan was impossible, Kabul is recreated in Germany, a displacement that subtly reinforces the sense that what we are watching already belongs to a lost past.

Sadat plays Naru, a television camerawoman relegated to directing patronizing daytime programs for women. When a petty professional slight sends her into a marketplace to gather Valentine’s Day interviews, she discovers that women will speak to her in ways they will not to her male colleagues. Nearly all insist there are no good men in the country. The film treats this refrain less as accusation than as a generational diagnosis, observing how boys grow up surrounded by models of casual humiliation and normalized violence. Qodrat, a colleague who respects Naru’s work and hints at genuine emotional intelligence, complicates the thesis without resolving it.

The tonal blend of romantic comedy and social chronicle is not always narratively refined, and some dialogue leans toward the didactic. Yet Sadat sustains a carefully calibrated optimism even as the historical backdrop darkens toward the Taliban’s return, which reframes the women’s fragile freedoms as already endangered. As an opening-night film, No Good Men feels unusually warm for Berlin, and disarmingly sincere in its belief that tenderness can survive even in hostile terrain.

A Prayer for the Dying 

John C Reilly and Johnny Flynn in A PRAYER FOR THE DYING © Lukasz Buk

Adapted from Stewart O’Nan’s 1999 novel, A Prayer for the Dying is set in 1870 in Friendship, a small Scandinavian settlement in Wisconsin. For director Dara Van Dusen, whose family was directly affected by COVID, the story of Jacob Hansen, a Civil War veteran offered a fragile second chance in a railroad town, carries unmistakable contemporary weight. What begins as a contained postwar drama gradually reveals itself as an anatomy of leadership under epidemiological threat.

When an undefined illness begins spreading through the community, Jacob’s unusual civic role sharpens the moral stakes. He is sheriff, pastor, and gravedigger at once, a convergence of authority that forces him into decisions with no precedent and no reliable information. When does quarantine begin. How do you prevent fear from accelerating contagion? What happens when the needs of one’s family collide with those of the town, and by extension the nation? The film’s most compelling dimension lies in filtering these questions through a veteran whose wartime trauma resurfaces under pressure, suggesting that crisis management is never abstract but shaped by buried wounds and survival instincts.

Visually, Van Dusen demonstrates striking assurance. Shot in Slovakia to recreate Wisconsin, the film opens in a haze of orange ash from which Jacob appears and disappears like a man already half claimed by history. The camera moves with deliberate, exploratory precision, often observing him from an exterior vantage point that evokes the spatial logic of video games and subtly shifts the tone from frontier drama toward psychological horror. Yet as the narrative scale expands, the film’s ambition begins to outpace its control. The final act grows repetitive and pushes beyond credibility in its escalating stakes. Even so, as a debut it remains memorable for its visual rigor and for the audacity of tackling communal catastrophe through an intimate, morally claustrophobic lens.

Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die

GOOD LUCK HAVE FUN DONT DIE

Nearly a decade after A Cure for Wellness, Gore Verbinski returns with a film that feels formally old school yet thematically wired into the present. Written by Matthew Robinson, Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die operates as a sharp internal critique of internet culture and social media dependency. It is not a simplistic call to unplug or retreat into pastoral nostalgia. Instead, it dissects the moral evasions and aesthetic distortions produced by a life lived permanently online, targeting the self induced compulsions that shape how we speak, look, and even imagine catastrophe.

There is an intentionally generational edge to the satire. Teenagers appear almost feral when forced to look up from their phones, speaking in a hybrid dialect stitched together from advertising slogans and algorithmic shorthand. Verbinski pushes this exaggeration toward horror, suggesting that the real violence lies in the flattening of language and empathy. The film is undeniably too long and eventually leans on a familiar techno dystopian twist that feels more dutiful than inspired. Yet at its best it captures the grotesque texture of the present with unnerving clarity. A deliberately grotesque CGI feline creature, hovering between cuteness and menace, crystallizes the point: an entire online aesthetic built on the collision of sweetness and brutality is, in itself, horror.

What ultimately elevates the film is Verbinski’s craftsmanship. The camera moves with muscular assurance, compositions are carefully controlled, and the use of diners, getaway cars, and cyclical narrative mechanics evokes American genre cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. That tactile sensibility grounds the digital anxiety in something materially legible. For all its excess, the film demonstrates that an old fashioned directorial hand can still render the online present strange enough to be seen anew.

Yellow Letters

YELLOW LETTERS

Like the festival opener, Yellow Letters transforms Germany into a stand in for an inaccessible elsewhere. İlker Çatak reconstructs Istanbul and Ankara through twenty one days of shooting in Hamburg, supplemented by Berlin locations, openly signaling the artifice with bold red chapter titles that announce the substitution. The gesture is not merely practical but thematic, reinforcing the film’s preoccupation with displacement and political estrangement.

Drawing on contemporary tensions ranging from attacks on universities by Trump Administration to the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the ongoing diaspora of Turkish intellectuals in Germany, the film centers on Derya and Aziz, a couple of artists who receive so called yellow letters from the Turkish state. The notices accuse them of criticizing the government after an incident during one of their performances, abruptly collapsing the precarious balance between artistic dissent and institutional recognition that had sustained their careers.

Çatak is most persuasive in his portrait of the couple before their fall. They are oppositional intellectuals who nonetheless benefit from prestigious platforms and relative comfort, figures whose moral authority is complicated by their embeddedness within the very systems they critique. Exile fractures them along revealing lines. Aziz retreats into principled austerity, driving a taxi and writing in isolation to preserve a sense of integrity. Derya, increasingly suffocated by dependence and domestic compromise, begins contemplating a softer strategy. The film pointedly interrogates how female autonomy remains conditional, not only within conservative religious frameworks but also within liberal artistic milieus that profess equality. At times the construction feels overly deliberate, its political parallels almost too neatly arranged, and it lacks the sharpness of Çatak’s earlier work. Still, its examination of pride, compromise, and the cost of dissent resonates well beyond its immediate context.