BERLIN26 REVIEW: Vier Minus Drei [Four Minus Three] [2026]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 121 minutes
Release Date: April 16th, 2026 (Germany)
Studio: Alamode Film
Director(s): Adrian Goiginger
Writer(s): Senad Halilbašić / Barbara Pachl-Eberhart (novel)

Don’t take it so seriously!

Based on Barbara Pachl-Eberhart’s book about overcoming her grief after losing her husband and two young children in a traffic collision, Adrian Goiginger’s Four Minus Three (adapted by Senad Halilbašić) starts with sounds of joy. Heli (Robert Stadlober) is playing with the kids (Jonas Recklie’s Thimo and Victoria Wild’s Fini) at breakfast while Barbara (Valerie Pachner) gets her suitcase ready for work. Their laughter becomes even more infectious as they go to work.

Why? Because Barbara and Heli are clowns. Yes, you literally can’t make this stuff up. She works at a hospital cheering up children and he has just begun his long-awaited one-man stage show that puts his mime technique to use opposite a red balloon. Their audiences laugh at the absurdity of their performances, proving their dreams to brighten the world are realized. And then tragedy strikes to change everything as their yellow van is no match for an oncoming train.

As with the entire film, Goiginger does a wonderful job centering Barbara and her experience of the accident. There’s no need to stage the crash when we are able to understand its effect through her uncertainty and confusion upon getting an ambiguous phone call while driving home. A voice says something happened by the tracks with their van spotted nearby, so Barbara calls her friend Sabine (Stefanie Reinsperger) to check it out since she’s still too far away.

We watch the wheels spinning and the fear mounting with each minute that passes. The calm desire to just call Heli and have him answer to assure everything is okay. The steady hope that getting his voicemail is a good sign because it means his phone is still on. And the unavoidable panic when Sabine calls back to tell her to avoid the tracks and just come straight to her house instead. Barbara can read between those lines as well as we can.

This is when our first foray into Barbara’s memory arrives … less an escape from her present circumstances than what she believes is proof they’ll be alright. That they’re speaking to her. That their presence in her mind is an assurance that they haven’t left her rather than evidence that they never will, even in death, as long as she refuses to forget them. The rest of the film alternates between current grief and past emotions as each event and feeling triggers new images.

It’s not therefore a coincidence when Barbara faints, smacking her forehead into a hospital counter. That bandaged cut and subsequent scar are grounding details that tell us when we are at a given moment since every memory exists from her unique vantage point. No, blood? Then you can assume Heli will appear to reveal how they met, got married, and fought since even their tough times together are cherished moments compared to this isolation apart.

The opening text specifically explains that the film is inspired by both the book and the real events that took place—an intriguing clarification considering one would assume the former being based on the latter bakes that fact in. I wonder then, never having read the book, if it simply means the script has taken dramatic liberties with certain facts to truly embrace the strengths of its medium as opposed to trying to shoehorn things in less cinematic ways.

Because it’s not just the gash on her forehead leading us through time to simultaneously help Barbara cope with her loss and exacerbate her pain. It’s the ability to let certain aspects give us whiplash to ensure we remember them later as reverberations rather just their instant effect. Heli’s mother demanding her comatose grandchildren be Baptized to save their souls or the unhealthy hope of Fini’s return sticking firmly to Barbara’s soul despite its impossibility.

This whole journey rests on Pachner’s shoulders as a result and the actor does not disappoint. Those reactions to the phone calls while driving unaware of what happened. The smile when the funeral director suggests the perfect little add-on and the silent frown when her mother-in-law rejects it. The large smile when Barbara leans into acceptance (perhaps too far too soon) and decides to celebrate their lives with a rousing clown parade. This character is brimming with life.

As such, the lows hit just as hard since she’s running without a safety net. When her desire to go back to work early is dashed, her grin turns to tears. When the prospect of helping “bring Fini back” hits its roadblocks, her laughter and despair (the circumstances surrounding these failures couldn’t be more different) are infectious and devastating in turn. Because Barbara must eventually come back to reality to move forward. To cherish the love she’s lost because it’s gone.

It’s why Hanno Koffler’s Friedrich Rauch proves an important piece as an outsider. He can be wielded antagonistically to push Barbara out of her fantasies when everyone else tiptoes around the enormity of what occurred. Not with malicious intent, but with a pragmatism and respect she needs to be shaken awake … even when she awakens in darkness. That anguish will ultimately heal her, though, because you can’t release it without first feeling its full weight.