‘I’m Not Stiller’ review: Paula Beer and Albrecht Schuch star in 1950s Zurich-set thriller

Dir. Stefan Haupt. Germany/Switzerland. 2025. 99mins

Max Frisch’s 1954 novel about the enigma of identity was published in German as Stiller, but is known in English translation as I’m Not Stiller – which conveys some sense of the contradictions this adaptation by Swiss writer/director Stefan Haupt must grapple. This 1950s-set drama is a teasing, unapologetically cerebral arthouse mystery about a possible case of mistaken identity, more an existential investigation than a thriller, per se.

This elusive drama never connects fully  

Screening in Munich’s CineCoPro Competition, I’m Not Stiller is solidly executed but low on stylistic verve. It has its best commercial asset in a strong performance from German star Paula Beer (seen recently in Christian Petzold’s Cannes premiere Miroirs No. 3), here starring opposite rising German name Albrecht Schuch (System Crasher, All Quiet On The Western Front). However, Swiss author Frisch – best known for his play The Fire Raisers and novels including Homo Faber, which Volker Schlöndorff filmed as Voyager – is no longer the modish literary name he once was, which may not help the international chances of this somewhat dour drama. The film will release in Germany (through Studiocanal) and Switzerland (Ascot Elite Entertainment) in October.

Set mainly in Zurich, Haupt’s film begins on a train, with a shaven-headed, leather-jacketed man (Schuch) apprehended and taken in for questioning. He insists he is a US visitor named James Larkin White, but the authorities are convinced he is Anatol Stiller, a Swiss sculptor who disappeared years earlier when suspected of involvement in a murder. 

The onus is on the imprisoned White to prove he is who he claims. Stiller’s wife Julika (Beer), a former ballet dancer, immediately identifies him as her errant husband. But flashbacks to the couple’s earlier life, in which Stiller is a fiery artist on the rise, show an apparently different man. In fact, the young Stiller is played with boyish nerviness by Sven Schelker, who looks sufficiently unlike Schuch – yet, in certain shots, sufficiently similar – to keep us guessing about the reliability of what is seen and heard, partly through other characters’ perceptions.

As the narrative flits through a series of non-chronological flashbacks – some sepia-tinged, some in black and white – Schuch and Schelker sometimes double up as Stiller in a single sequence. All this keeps us weighing up the evidence, along with Julika herself and a prosecutor (Max Simonischek) whose wife (Marie Leuenberger, from Berlin standout Mother’s Baby) happens to have had an affair with Stiller years back – kicking off at, what else, a masked ball.

Haupt (who won Berlin’s Panorama audience award for 2014 feature The Circle) and co-writer Alexander Buresch contrive an elegantly tricky structure that is not short of existential resonance in developing Frisch’s inquiry into being, appearance and truth. And the barbs at obsessive Swiss cleanness, in hygiene, architecture and mores, are cannily threaded through the drama. 

Yet the result is ponderous in its sober-minded restraint. And while that discipline works effectively for Beer (no stranger to the riddles of identity in Francois Ozon’s Frantz and her films with Petzold), Schuch’s mystery man never quite holds the centre, hampered as he is by a role that, of its nature, demands he never quite comes into focus. Even so, Schuch is at his most engaging when manifestly performing as a man who might or might not be playing his own role – a paradox that goes some way to explaining why this elusive drama never connects fully.