Police psychologist Jo is sent to the small Thuringian city of Dreileben to assist in the hunt for escaped sex offender Frank Molesch. The real driving force behind the story, however, is Jo’s meeting with an old friend from her university days, Vera, who has moved to Dreileben with her husband, Bruno, a writer of undemanding fiction. Jo discovers that she and Vera were once in love (and in bed) with the same guy – and he’s still on both their minds… Dreileben was an experiment in ‘fence-free filmmaking’, as Christian Petzold called it. He, Christoph Hochhäusler and Graf each made a film set in Dreileben and constructed around Molesch’s escape, sharing some of the actors and allowing their respective stories to intermittently intersect. Yet, each of the three films is a stand-alone work. Graf’s turned out to be the most intriguing of the triptych: a woman’s picture in crime garb about times lost and regained, love consumed yet undigested, ancient lust glowing like embers – and life never fully adding up.
