TWO TO ONE

Germany, 2024, 115 minutes, Colour.

Sandra Huller, Max Reimelt, Ronald Zehrfeld, Ursula Werner.

Directed by Natja Brunckhorst.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a communist family discovers a bunker full of money soon to be worthless. With the help of their neighbors, they embark on a race against time to enter the capitalist world in style.

Two to One is entertaining but taking audiences back into the history of East Germany, the Berlin Wall coming down, 1990 and the ambiguous status of East Germany before unification.

Audiences will remember Goodbye, Lenin, which has an episode about East German buried cash and some exploitation during unification. This film amplifies that story, a local community in a building discovering mountains of dumped cash, skills in exploiting it, the authorities eventually clamping down.

But, the screenplay highlights the oppression of East Germans, their hard work and industry exploited by the authorities, the population lied to. The film raises all kinds of serious reflections on East Germany but throughout the film, there is humour in the characters and their relationships.

One of the recommendations for seeing this film is the presence of celebrated German actress, Sandra Hullers, who came to international prominence with Toni Erdmann and an Oscar nomination for her role in Anatomy of a Fall and noted for her performance as the wife of the head of Auschwitz, Zone of Interest.