‘Allegro Pastell’ review: German drama is precise, emotionless study of millennial malaise

Dir: Anna Roller. Germany. 2026. 100mins

A relationship drama that also plays as an X-ray of millennial neurosis, Allegro Pastell is not unlike its protagonists – clean-cut, anxious, very smart and oddly bloodless. Scripted by Leif Randt, on whose own bestselling 2020 novel it is based, this tale of an angsty, performative on-off love affair between a writer and a website designer is low-key to the point of inertia, and peopled with characters whose range of concerns extends little further than themselves – dramatic negatives that are partially redeemed by the sharpness of its social observations.

Low-key to the point of inertia

Allegro Pastell explores issues also addressed in the work of Sally Rooney and Vincenzo Latronico, and seems designed to appeal primarily to millennials who are finding their feet. This demographic could ensure some further festival success following its Berlin Panorama premiere.

We first meet successful debut novelist Tanja (Sylvaine Faligant) and website designer Jerome (Jannis Niewöhner) lying on tastefully rumpled bedsheets, uncertainly trying to persuade each other, and themselves, that they’re happy in their long-distance relationship. This is the first of many micro-tensions in the film, few of which ever flower into actual drama. Tanja lives in a buzzy Berlin of book launches, nightclubs and electropop, Jerome in his parents’ house in the sedate outskirts of Frankfurt. They communicate mainly by email, a mode that proves far more revelatory than their in-person exchanges. Sometimes they take drugs, but always in a carefully controlled manner.

For her 34th birthday, Jerome has designed a website for Tanja but, rather than being grateful, she tells him she feels as though he’s stalking her. Her mood remains downbeat through her birthday party, which she finds exhausting: before long Tanja is sleeping with Janis (Nico Ehrenteit), who is in a relationship with Tanja’s friend Amelie (Vera Flück). Back in Frankfurt, Jerome bumps into an old school friend, Marlene (Haley Louise Jones), and a hesitant relationship between them tentatively develops.

The flat, numbed tone of Randt’s novel, in which nothing comes across as being more or less remarkable than anything else, is transferred elegantly by Roller and Randt to the screen: despite the fact that dramatic issues of love and loss are on the line, conversations are unfailingly guarded and respectful. Conflicts are avoided rather than confronted, played out in designer-catalogue settings drenched in the pastel hues of the title, where nothing can ever be messy or out of place.

Tanja and Jerome’s narrowness, self-obsession and fear of commitment to anyone but themselves make them hard to like. Randt’s script is at its best when observing them from an ironical distance – a distance which mirrors their own detached, non-committal view of each other. Relationships also become self-conscious and performative at the interface between real world emotions and a digital world of information. The debate about whether or not to have children, when having more children is the single biggest driver of climate change, is a constant concern of the characters. There is dark humour to be found in all this – Sarah’s character has a dog called Bernie Sanders - but Allegro Pastell is too proper ever to strike the comic note.

Felix Pflieger’s camerawork is as highly curated as everything else. In a couple of scenes, the camera drifts away from the action to alight on a raindrop or a streetlight, small symbols of a clarity that the film’s characters seem destined never to achieve.