‘The Ideas’ review: Six witty vignettes power director/star Fabian Stumm’s slice-of-life German anthology

Dir: Fabian Stumm. Germany/Sweden. 2026. 110mins

At the start of The Ideas, Marie-Lou Sellem plays a catfisher who forms an unexpected bond with one of her marks, a lonely singleton played with appealing empathy by Hans Löw. This would make a decent jumping off point for an extended narrative based on these characters, but this is an anthology film, so we’re left to wonder what-if – and perhaps that open-endedness is the point.

Highly watchable and beautifully acted

This is the latest feature from actor-director Fabian Stumm following Sad Jokes, which premiered in Munich in 2024 before embarking on a healthy festival run, and his 2023 debut Bones And Names, which bowed in Berlin. Highly watchable and beautifully acted, The Ideas features a strong German cast including Angela Winkler (The Tin Drum) and Maren Eggert (Silver Bear winner at Berlin in 2021 for I’m Your Man). It shoud find an audience domestically and perhaps could make something of a mark on the international arthouse circuit following its Zurich competition premiere.

After moving on from the catfisher, we’re introduced to a younger set of characters (they’re either young Millennials or elder Gen Z), with Romina Küper’s amusingly abrasive and self-centred would-be entrepreneur attempting to hit up more level-headed characters played by Katharina Stark and Jonas Dassler (The Golden Glove) for start-up cash they’d be unlikely to see back. Next up is one of the most compelling vignettes, and a canny showcase of the director’s acting skills: Stumm casts himself opposite Eggert, in a tense and well-written encounter between a man and woman who had an inappropriate sexual relationship many years ago, when he was 16 and she was 22.

The tone is a little lighter in the following chapter, where an agreeable ex-couple are waiting at a court of law to finalise their amicable divorce – an underexplored dynamic in cinema, perhaps because friendly break-ups lack the conflict we look for in drama. Yet there’s something strangely moving about witnessing the formal ending of a marriage that seems to have gone so well in some ways. That’s followed by perhaps the funniest section, in which Winkler is one of a group of creatives rehearsing what seems to be quite a bad play. Proceedings then draws to a close with another couple in trouble, but with rather more ill-feeling.

Building on the themes of Sad Jokes, The Ideas is a wry and thoughtful exploration of the human condition. Its limitations are baked-in: we’re not sticking with any individual character long enough to get to know them in the same way that we would with a feature-length arc, but Stumm is aware of this. More interesting, then, is his use of that the great advantage of the anthology format: the sense of a godlike overview. The idea that one’s pain is particular and unique can be fed by narrative cinema with a focus on the individual. In anthology cinema, there is a sense of collective needs and desires, disappointments and ambitions, all co-existing across the different narrative strands.

In some ways, the strongest comparison points for The Ideas would be not to cinema but 19th century novels: whopping great multi-character tomes like Middlemarch, which spend time developing a vast cast of characters in an effort to convey George Elliot’s vision of those who “lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” – regular, everyday human folks, facing their modest struggles, rather than leaders, politicians or heroes. The scope of The Ideas is limited still further by the fleeting nature of our encounters with the characters – each episode plays out within a modest timeframe; there’s no leap forward to check in on the long-term consequences of any decisions.

Nor is this a bird’s eye view attempting to encompass the diversity of all humanity: the characters are all middle class, white, relatively comfortable, able-bodied and so on. It’s a slice of that particular kind of life, rather than having any ambitions to be universal. These characters are the types of people who showed up in Ruben Östlund’s 2017 film The Square, and the film will likely attract a similar sort of audience.