"Mariana Trench": Touching film about grief and loss ... The film adaptation of the successful novel with Luna Wedler and Edgar Selge by marine biologist and author Jasmin Schreiber "Mariana Trench" is honest, funny and sad at the same time. A balancing act that succeeds.
It is the same recurring nightmare that the main character Paula, played by Luna Wedler, has in "Marianengraben". A nightmare that shrouds her in darkness, takes away the air she breathes, all her life energy. A nightmare in which her deceased brother Tim appears, drowned when he was just nine years old. One night at the cemetery, her place of retreat to mourn this adventurer and ocean explorer, as it says on his gravestone, she meets old, odd Helmut by chance. The two form a community of fate, an acquaintance of convenience.
Helmut wants to scatter his ex-wife's ashes in the south, Paula wants to be close to Tim. They are two eccentrics in a camper van on their way south, united by one thing: the grief for a loved one, the desire to be close to them again, because Helmut has not only lost his ex-wife, but once also his son.
The tone of "Marianengraben" is sentimental. Again and again - in keeping with the novel - Paula talks to herself with Tim, in flashbacks, as a kind of inner monologue. Then, in the present, there is the unusual, slowly budding friendship between Helmut and Paula - and two animals: Helmut's dog Judy and a stray chicken, Lutz.
