User Reviews

"Gleißendes Glück" is an award-winning 100-minute movie from last year, so this is still relatively new and fresh Writer (with others) and director is Sven Taddicken and this is his most recent work. He got help from two of Germany's most known actors, namely Martina Gedeck and Ulrich Tukur and within the limitations of the script they are doing a decent job, nothing bad nothing great. Sadly Johannes Krisch did not have as much of an impact or as much screen time as I hoped he would. It is really almost all about Gedeck's character here. Religion plays a big role in this film as well as relationships. But as a whole, I would say the story did not really keep me interested as much from start to finish to a level where I would say I recommend checking this film out unless you are a huge Gedeck fan perhaps. I kinda like her too, but not enough to give this movie a thumbs-up I guess. It wasn't even that not enough happened in here. Maybe the opposite: Too much happened and not all of it felt realistic and authentic. This includes violence as well to a major extent. I don't know. Somehow the core story between Tukur's and Gedeck's character never really made a difference. Maybe the two do not have the very greatest chemistry. Anyway, there are still some other films by Taddicken i will check out in the coming months/years, but this one here did not really raise my interest in these. Underwhelming outcome here. Don't watch.

(2016) Original Bliss/ Gleißendes Glück (In Germany with English subtitles) PSYCHOLOGICAL DRAMA

Co-written and directed by Sven Taddicken that has middle age housewife, Helene Brindel (Martina Gedeck) having a dysfunctional relationship with her abusive husband, Christoph Brindel (Johannes Krisch) as well as suffers from insomnia. So she becomes fixated with one of the authors she has read a book about she had purchase, who is supposedly a renown self help author, Eduard E. Gluck (Ulrich Tukur). And upon her meeting with him on on one of his tours, she manages a meet and greet, or an appointment with him to visit him when he stops by Hamburg, and she does this by lying to her husband by telling him she is going there to see her sister, when in actuality she is going there to see the author himself.

While I was watching this, I was like, if the author Eduard E. Gluck was so synonymous, why is he himself is single, or has lived as a single man all his life, or what are his previous relationships are like before he met Helen? Is he impotent as Helen is to her husband, Christoph? I did not get any answers to any of those questions.

And because I do not live in Germany, and is unfamiliar with the laws there, Helen's husband Christoph is an one note performance, and despite him being physically abusive to the point of placing his wife into the hospital, viewers are oblivious whether he was ever charged for putting his hands on her. For there also appears to be a lack of a verbal communication between Christoph and his wife, Helen. For example, when her husband suspects something was going on between her and Eduard, and it is like, he never asks her whether she had cheated on him! And of course, Helen had "never" cheated on him with Eduard as the relationship is strictly platonic the time he discovered the postcard. But yet, physically beating her is acceptable, that message does not sit well with me, regardless whether she ends up with Eduard or whether religion is involved or not.